Frontier Airlines Gets Rid of Telephone Customer Service (cnbc.com) 57
Say goodbye to the airline call center -- at least at Frontier Airlines. From a report: The budget carrier has completed its transition to online, mobile and text support, which enables it to ensure that customers get "the information they need as expeditiously and efficiently as possible," spokeswoman Jennifer de la Cruz told CNBC in an e-mailed statement. Passengers who call the customer service number Frontier lists on its website now get the message: "At Frontier, we offer the lowest fares in the industry by operating our airline as efficiently as possible. We want our customers to be able to operate efficiently as well, which is why we make it easy to find what you need at Flyfrontier.com or on our mobile app." Those who want to text with the carrier can get a link to do so sent to their phone. Most major carriers still offer customer service lines. But Frontier, which charges fees for everything from advanced seat assignments to carry-on luggage and snacks, is often looking for ways to cut expenses. During its investor day earlier this month, Frontier hinted that it would stop offering customer service by phone, a change that travel site Travel Noire reported earlier this week. Further reading: US Fines Airlines More Than $7 Million for Not Providing Refunds.
all the more reason to avoid Frontier (Score:2, Insightful)
Frontier is already on my list of do-not-book airlines. The recent news about cutting their call center cements that decision.
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Wow. For a second I thought I was on Twitter.
Re:all the more reason to avoid Frontier (Score:5, Interesting)
I do have at least 99% of my flight needs taken care of online...
BUT...that time when I really need to speak to a person, I want to speak to a person.
(Preferably one I that speaks English that I can understand).
There are just some circumstances where you need to speak to a human.
As an aside...am I the only one that HATES having to talk to the damned robo-answer system?
It's bad enough to have to deal with them, but for fucks sake, let me answer with button presses instead of having to speak to the damned machine in the phone, eh?
Really a PITA in an office setting where everyone in cubeville can listen in to what you're doing, or even if you have to do this out in public somewhere.
I usually just get frustrated and start yelling "give me a fucking operator"...and usually they finally do.
I just hate talking to fucking machines...am I the only one?
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I can't stand it.
If there is a queue for requests to "Connect me to a fucking human," my call ends up in that one with you.
--
I think I'd take a human butler over a robot one. - Tom Felton
Re: all the more reason to avoid Frontier (Score:1)
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Haha. Have you talked to any of those alleged humans recently? They only hire morons these days.
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This is intentional by the companies. They hope to piss you off enough that you hang up and not cost them money.
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It's bad enough to have to deal with them, but for fucks sake, let me answer with button presses instead of having to speak to the damned machine in the phone, eh?
This. A thousand times this. Even more so if you are using the phone in a place with background noise, or, like 99% of the population, you don't have a perfect mid-Atlantic accent.
Re:all the more reason to avoid Frontier (Score:5, Funny)
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I (well, really my wife) deal with a lot of airlines. Many airlines require a call in order to book a specific flight combination, occasionally for good reason. A few require calls for changes or refunds. Then there are a few that actually have functioning apps *and* websites that let you easily do everything you could want quickly and painlessly from whatever device you have. I want to fly those airlines; they make it easy.
I have never flown Frontier, but if they actually improved their processes to the po
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I have never flown Frontier
I'm just a random guy on the internet, but my advice is, don't. I used to live in Colorado and used them a lot since 2002. They used to be an OK budget airline, but they gradually just started nickel and diming the passengers harder and harder. Last time I flew on them was in 2016. Got a coat? That's a carry on and they'll charge you. Got a wallet? That's a carry on and they'll try to charge you. Want to choose your seat? There's a charge for that. Don't care where you sit? That option is hidden and the pri
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Frontier and Southwest are on my "do not use" list. Frontier earned that by charging for everything and still putting everyone on tiny lawn chairs. Southwest earned their status by not having reserved seating.
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Telephone is always my last resort (Score:4, Interesting)
If I am taking the time out of my day to telephone your company, then it is because I can not do what I want to do with digital channels. The digital tools most companies provide are needlessly limiting.
For example - does Frontier have a full zero-charge digital rebooking tool that is *always instantly available* when a flight is delayed or cancelled? Most airlines *DO NOT*, they force you to see a gate agent or call in.
Web chats simmialrly suffer from a horrible useability problem, and that is the hold time. Calling in, being put on hold, I can throw it on speakerphone and keep dong things in the background for 30 minutes. On a web chat, 99% of the time, this does not work - the chat requires you to be on the browser tab, and if you are 30 seconds late in response, the agent closes the chat.
If the chat was available over Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or any other platform that had proper asynchronous communication worked out, this would help solve this problem.
Warning to those who've not travelled in a while.. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. You absolutely need access to your email and/or a website at the terminal. (No phone? They don't care.)
2. Your airline has no human to talk to at the terminal.
3. Your airline has no customer service phone number that they actually pick up.
Yes, this can be true even for major airlines.
If there's any problem whatsoever with your phone, you could be effed. I mean, royally effed. For this reason alone I would strongly advise anyone to never travel internationally alone.
Or if you do, always have a backup device on you, such as a laptop.
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I'm curious (as the last time I travelled internationally was about a year ago).
Can you still print out boarding passes at home/hotel before getting to the airport? I've always felt much more confident with a paper backup in my grubby little fingers.
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Yes, every domestic airline (United, Delta, SW, JetBlue, Frontier, Spirit, AA etc) when you check in will give you a PDF to print.
Also can just print it out at the kiosk once you are at the airport and those are usually still printed on somewhat studier materials than printer paper.
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Kiosks have a habit of all being down or broken.
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Then you gotta wait in line for the full service counter. If you were checking a bag same difference, if carry on only, well shoulda printed at home. If you are worried enough to want the paper then you should be prepared for downed kiosks, just my opinion as a fairly frequent flyer.
I usually see a down rate of around 25% for kiosks. Most are usually up though since so many airlines are now on the "bag drop" system of having the kiosk print the luggage tag and then you just bring it up to be weighed and
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Didn't work out so well for one Spirit Airlines passenger I was trying to help.
Got them to the kiosk, entered their info, it spits out a "we need to see your documentation at the ticket counter" slip, no boarding pass.
I look over at the Spirit counter, everyone is gone to the break room until the next flight in a few hours.
At that point I have no one I can send them to for help.
They missed that flight and I don't know what ultimately happened to them.
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Sounds like they were not checked in properly then.
Root issue here is poor customer service that there were no CS reps at the counter, which, well, Spirit Airlines.
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Dear god I hope people aren't flying Frontier for international destinations, unless we're talking Canada and Mexico.
I flew Frontier once, and that was enough to know that I don't want to do that ever again. I couldn't imagine being stuck in that shitbox aircraft for 12+ hours with no reclining seats, and having to pay for anything beyond a tiny bottle of water.
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This BS is part of a larger trend. Traveling internationally, you can easily encounter all three of these at once:
1. You absolutely need access to your email and/or a website at the terminal. (No phone? They don't care.)
2. Your airline has no human to talk to at the terminal.
3. Your airline has no customer service phone number that they actually pick up.
Yes, this can be true even for major airlines.
If there's any problem whatsoever with your phone, you could be effed. I mean, royally effed. For this reason alone I would strongly advise anyone to never travel internationally alone.
Any time I travel, before I leave the house, I print out two copies of a simple text file that has flight #s and times, record locator, and customer service phone #, hotel conf #, address, and cust svc #, rental car info, etc. One goes in my carry on, and the other in checked bag if I have one.
Then at least I can borrow a phone, and just make a phone call instead of having to try to get into my email.
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This BS is part of a larger trend. Traveling internationally, you can easily encounter all three of these at once:
1. You absolutely need access to your email and/or a website at the terminal. (No phone? They don't care.)
2. Your airline has no human to talk to at the terminal.
3. Your airline has no customer service phone number that they actually pick up.
Yes, this can be true even for major airlines.
If there's any problem whatsoever with your phone, you could be effed. I mean, royally effed. For this reason alone I would strongly advise anyone to never travel internationally alone.
Or if you do, always have a backup device on you, such as a laptop.
And if you're traveling internationally, you'd better be 100% sure that your phone's international roaming is 100% seamless and that SMS will still be delivered 100% reliably with minimal lag.... note that the SMS spec itself makes no guarantee of this!
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This BS is part of a larger trend. Traveling internationally, you can easily encounter all three of these at once:
1. You absolutely need access to your email and/or a website at the terminal. (No phone? They don't care.)
2. Your airline has no human to talk to at the terminal.
3. Your airline has no customer service phone number that they actually pick up.
Yes, this can be true even for major airlines.
If there's any problem whatsoever with your phone, you could be effed. I mean, royally effed. For this reason alone I would strongly advise anyone to never travel internationally alone.
Or if you do, always have a backup device on you, such as a laptop.
As someone who travels internationally on a regular basis, this is paranoid nonsense.
If anything I'd recommend if you're worried about getting stuck somewhere is to have something like Skype on your phone which you can use to directly call your airline "from" your home country. I've only ever had to do this for my bank however. Usually there is someone on the ground you can speak to and unless you're a raging arsehole, most people will try to help you. Yeah, being nice is the best way to get people to he
Sometimes you need to speak to a human (Score:3)
Checklists and digital "assistents" can only regurgitate what management think will be important and often the information is not up to date. Sometimes you need a human to go find something out thats not publically aavailable and the quickest way to do that is by talking to them, not pissing about with a text interface where they disappear off for 10 mins for a coffee halfway through.
However this requires employing people which a lot of companies seemed loathed to do these days and their attitude to customers is "suck it up or go elsewhere where the service is just as shit anyway so good luck".
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Just remember (Score:5, Insightful)
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"gain efficiency by shortcutting maintenance."
IOW just like a lot of african and ex-soviet state airlines.
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Oh, they've been doing that for years already. The one and only time I flew Frontier, we were delayed from taking off for 90 minutes because the light bulb on an emergency exit sign was burned out, and they had no spares anywhere at that airport. We had to wait for another aircraft to land, so they could take a bulb from that one to get us out of there, and then play "musical light bulbs" among aircraft until they got one there from somewhere else.
Frontier is a shit airline and I will not fly them ever ag
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Oh, they've been doing that for years already. The one and only time I flew Frontier, we were delayed from taking off for 90 minutes because the light bulb on an emergency exit sign was burned out, and they had no spares anywhere at that airport. We had to wait for another aircraft to land, so they could take a bulb from that one to get us out of there, and then play "musical light bulbs" among aircraft until they got one there from somewhere else.
Frontier is a shit airline and I will not fly them ever again, no matter how much cheaper the fare is.
Holy hell - if they skimp on lightbulbs, imagine what else.
Meh (Score:3)
As a retail end user, I called Microsoft tech support when Windows 95 came out because it wouldn't work with my CD-ROM drive and wasn't knowledgeable enough to fix it myself then. A knowledgeable man in the US spent 45 minutes (for free) with me getting it to work after we modified a configuration file or two. Only a few years later, my tech support call to AOL while at a customer's location included AOL trying to advertise to me after they put me on hold during my customer's computer's reboot process. I politely told them I couldn't authorize any purchases at this customer's site and to please reconnect me to the tech who was helping me. The call was immediately disconnected. I'll assume it was an accident, but my frustration reached level 10.
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For what it's worth, there are still companies out there that care about customer service. They are just not the cheapest service provider out there - they offer service to customers that are willing to pay a bit more for more comfort, and more service for when things land shit-side-up. In the airline sector, this is the primary difference between a carrier such as Frontier, and a carrier such as Delta.
The Delta experience is just better in every measurable way with the exception of price tag.
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Re: Meh (Score:2)
Even BA Gold, for first class travelers, has had my dad waiting on hold for 15 mins. I have to wait 30-40 mins when I call them as an economy traveler.
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Which is why AOL is out of business.
The vaunted efficiency of private sector. (Score:2)
Government is inefficient, bureaucrats are bad, look at private sector, it is so efficient.
Private sector provides maximum goods and services at minimum cost.
These statements are true. But if you dont pay attention to how efficiency and cost are defined, you will be fooled.
Cost is the cost to the company, the provider, not to the consumer. Under some circumstances, the savings will be passed on to the customer, but not always.
Efficiency is defin
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The private sector is not more efficient as a rule. The private sector just tries a lot harder to make people and society pay in indirect ways and to give the crappiest service possible. Sure, government services are usually pretty bad, but they are typically functional in a non-failed state. Private sector, often not so much. There are exceptions, but no business process optimized by a nearsighted bean-counter (the standard these days) will ever be good for the customer or, really, in the long run good for
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"There are exceptions, but no business process optimized by a nearsighted bean-counter (the standard these days) will ever be good for the customer or, really, in the long run good for the business."
Good for the customer no, but if every business does the same then the customer has no choice so it doesn't matter if a business has a crap service if every other business has an equally crap service. Unfortunately this is where we've got to in 2022 with covid being used as an excuse to cut staffing and naturall
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Well, yes. In the case of an all-too-common market failure you are screwed. One reason why working antitrust is so critically important to keep capitalism working. In the US, greed and stupidity and blind trust in a self-regulating market (which basically cannot exist for a longer time) has sabotaged antitrust to a rather large degree. The customers, who usually also are the voters, basically did it to themselves though.
So now you can "chat" with Artificial Ignorance? (Score:2)
Well, my guess is their call-centers were not any better either.
Considering everything... (Score:2)
Gotta be an ADA issue here. (Score:3)
Thinking there's gotta be an ADA issue here. I could understand reducing call center staffing by firewalling them behind a phone maze, but completely closing it?
No thanks. Halfords, Game, Curry's etc (Score:1)
Avoid, avoid, avoid. (Score:2)
Also getting rid of airport customer service? (Score:2)
I connected through DFW in June (on a different airline). While I was walking around, I heard the page "would a representative of Frontier Airlines please report to your ticket counter" multiple times... it sounded like they'd abandoned it and customers were left standing around.
Frontier Airlines gets rid of customer service (Score:2)
FTFY
FA's customer service was already practically non-existent. This move won't make much difference.
ATT U-verse TOO (Score:2)
So What Else Is New? (Score:2)
I have virtually given up the phone call as a viable means to get anything done. If you call, it starts out with "Press 1 for English" and then there are 47 more button presses before you still don't get to talk to a human, which is the only way the issue is going to get resolved, and I don't get any service for the issue.|
I just dropped my insurance company that closed their local office, replacing it with an office that is a 100 mile drive round-trip. I replaced them with an insurance company with a lo
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A tangential but related issue - businesses that have a local office have WAY less of a problem with identity theft, and if identity theft/hijacked account etc somehow does happen, you can go and speak to a human to get the problem resolved. This is why I get angry when banks try to close physical branches in order to "save money," which is just code for "fuck the customers to please the shareholders."
They will drop Twitter support soon (Score:2)