OUR three-week South American trip has entailed 13 flight segments, we’ve just started the penultimate leg from Miami to New York which prompts some thoughts on technology and the customer experience.
It takes no real insight to notice the most stressful part of flying is getting into and out of your assigned seat.
Even though I’m not built for economy seats at 6ft tall, once I’ve settled into my personal space the flight itself invariably goes smoothly and predictably – even if it’s not 100% comfortable.
Food and drink comes and goes, I read or doze, and we make steady progress to our destination.
Contrast this with the stop-go uncertainty of the pre and post-flight stages.
We’ve just survived (and I used the word advisedly) a fraught 2hr transfer in Miami. We touched down ahead of schedule, but a 30min delay waiting for the gate to clear wiped out any potential breathing space… and a further 10min wait for someone to open the aircraft door ensured that we would be struggling to make the connection.
We then spent another 20mins in the bedlam that is US Immigration. A further unexplained delay of 30mins while our baggage arrived left us running to join a scrum of equally stressed and irritable people down at the departure gate.
While technology enables an airport such as Miami to handle tens of thousands of passengers cost effectively every day, the dehumanised processing results in a poor customer experience.
The US Immigration Service doubtless has the fastest computers and best databases, but it also has the longest queues and the most harassed and consequently surly staff.
The officer for our line delighted in turning away the group ahead of us with an incorrectly completed form, and revelled in informing us that a snowstorm had cancelled all flights to New York – it was a snippet of information which served only to raise our blood pressure further and make us even more angry!
How much more friendly was the first impression created by officials in Quito, Ecuador, or La Paz, Bolivia.
Here they seemed genuinely keen to welcome us to their country.
Similarly, the anonymous Miami baggage system left 300 passengers milling with increasing frustration around an empty carousel.
Our baggage was equally delayed on arrival three weeks earlier at Baltra on the Galapagos, but we could see it on the tarmac and sympathised with the ground staff unable to get their tractor started.
Our experience in New York was depressingly similar.
No immigration, bags to collect or customs to clear this time, but another agitated huddle at the departure gate; another over-booked flight with desperate standby passengers; and even another surly airport official, this time a security officer upset at queues encroaching into her territory.
In Miami and New York airports, fluent in the native language, we might have expected to feel more at ease than in the terminals at Cusco or Guyaquil where our few words of Spanish barely extended beyond ordering a couple of beers.
But in Miami there were no staff to ask when we needed directions to the gate, or reassurance on our bags.
Only technology – essential to efficiency, but depersonalising for the customer.