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Worse, is that they only reimburse for items for which you have receipts (who saves all their receipts?) and they can refuse to refund you for anything. At the end they refund me for the bag cost plus a present for which I had a receipt. No refund for anything else I had in the bag.
It needs a revolution, from the likes of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc.
Having said that, I feel like an airline can do a lot of make the travel experience easier for their passengers. Some airlines, such as Virgin, even try. But, in the absence of a plausible explanation, I would just go with lower standards of ethics. It is the same disease that plagued the financial system.
These airlines just need to understand this simple fact: if you delight your customers, they will come back and be willing to pay more for the same trip. You don't need alliances and frequent flier miles to buy the loyalty of your customers.
Or just fly Virgin next time ;).
Oh boy, rant against how bad the airlines are #832,291,845 made it to the front page! I can't wait for the circle jerk discussion about how bad they suck!
I used to think this was due to some sort of societal shift towards being people being more dick-ish and self-absorbed, but now I think it is just a case of efficiency run amok.
In order for companies to be efficient they define very narrow roles for employees, define a narrow set of likely interactions, and train only for dealing with those and then eventually base performance metrics off of only that narrowly defined set of predefined actions. When something even slightly out of the ordinary occurs, nobody is incentivized or authorized to take steps off the playbook to make things right. So you end up with massive gridlock where the employees can't really help you so they stall and redirect, which is probably almost as frustrating for them (I'm assuming here, I don't work in customer service) as it is for us.
Even the modern companies lauded for their great customer service like Amazon or Apple pretty much fit into this "pre-defined interactions" model but side-step some of the bigger problems by just having a very liberal "okay, we'll swap it for you with no questions asked" policy, which is still just a mostly automatic process and in some cases doesn't actually fix the real problems, but at least it is a policy under which the customer makes out better than in the usual case of being sent on a wild-goose chase of contacts only to eventually smash into a brick wall.