Bad Ticket Agents and the Conspiracy Theory
Airline Agents Behaving Badly?
There's a conspiracy theory afoot or aloft I should say: airline ticket agents are plotting against you at every checkpoint if you don't tow the line, do as you're told or leave them the heck alone. At least those are some of the assertions made in a recent MSNBC piece: Revenge of the Ticket Agents.As a former ticket agent, I knew legions of lousy agents, but there were ranks of good ones, too. Even between the whole lot, I never knew of an agent who targeted a passenger for whatever the reason. Trust me, most bad agents just wanted to get you out of their breathing space. It's more about laziness than spite.
I found the idea of an agent flagging a passenger deliberately for a secondary search disturbing. When I worked for an airline, tickets were flagged independently of an agent's action or desire to do so. There was one exception in which an agent could flag a passenger, but it was based on ticketing history and very specific check-in parameters. Terrorist identification was not left up to intuition of the ticket agent.
The whole thing about getting kicked off a flight at the whim of an agent is ridiculous. If you're drunk, sure you can be removed but it takes some consensus from the crew and a whole lot of politically correct talk to remove the chap or chap-ess without calling them a drunken...well you choose the noun.Yep, I worked with some trolls and some saints and I never witness anyone going out of their way to vindictively target a passenger. Trust me, passengers don't sit passively by when they think they've been wronged. And when you board a flight and notice there are vacant aisle seats after all, the agent had little to do with it. Just remember, passengers could have misconnected, missed the flight, or seats could have been blocked for premier travelers or cancelled last minute. There are many reasons that seats become available after boarding.
Agents have so little time to get a plane out on time or at least try to, that scheming through the day to torture passengers takes too much energy and it's a waste of time. Agents who would take this kind of customer service low road would never last on the job. Sure there are some bad agent apples, but by industry design, they’d likely get sauced by the airline before making too many travelers sick.
Comments
Right on! That is so true! There are some tacky agents and some tacky passengers but it's usually nothing personal.
Now flight attendants... that's another conspiracy story all together.
Posted by: Shandane | October 3, 2007 3:59 PM