Handling the Pre-Thanksgiving Travel Rush: STELLAService Tests Airlines on Call Support

Traveling during Thanksgiving is stressful enough, so there’s nothing worse than the added frustration of a bad customer service experience on your flight out of town. To give you a glimpse at which airlines are going the extra mile to make things smoother and faster for travelers this week, we decided to stress test each carrier’s call support…and we found some surprising results!

STELLAService evaluated the 13 largest airlines (as reported by the U.S. Department of Transportation) to uncover which were the quickest at answering customer concerns over the phone ahead of the big travel weekend.

Highlights From the Study

• Individual wait times varied from 43 seconds to over 30 minutes.
• Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Airlines took the top two spots as the only airlines with average hold times under 2 minutes.
• American Airlines ranked as the most responsive of the five largest U.S. carriers (Delta, American, United, Southwest and Continental).
• 73% of the calls placed to Virgin America required wait times of over 30 minutes. Note: Virgin America is telling travelers that they should expect longer than usual wait times to reach a live agent as the company transitions to a new reservation system.
• United Airlines and Continental Airlines, which still operate separate call centers, both averaged over 5 minutes, placing them last among the five largest U.S. carriers.

Click to enlarge image

Unusual Spot for Virgin America

While most of the airlines seem well-prepared to handle the holiday rush, the surprise from our study was obviously Virgin America, with an average wait of over 24 minutes to reach a live representative. This figure is also understated since we capped the maximum hold time at 30 minutes, and most of the Virgin America calls hit that threshold.

The obvious question is this: why would Virgin America transition its sales and customer service platform to a new system so close to one of the busiest travel days of the year? It has created a very unusual sight on Twitter and other social commenting platforms, with travelers complaining about the airline’s service instead of praising it (Virgin America is known for its great service – sometimes even in the same conversation as Zappos!). The Company’s CEO has made a public apology, stating that they’re working to resolve the issues as fast as they can.

Tell Us About Your Experience

Have your weekend travels begun? If you’re flying to your Turkey Day destination, what has the customer service experience been like so far, and which Airline did you fly?

————————————————————————–

Methodology details: Through 390 calls to the airlines over a five day period, STELLAService engaged each airline five times per day from November 16th through November 21st, asking general customer service questions on each call (flight status, bag fees, website questions, etc). Calls were placed at random during the following time-blocks to generate measurements of service performance that have high reliability and construct validity: 8:00 -11:30am EST;; 11:30 – 2:00pm EST; 2:00 – 5:00pm EST; 5:00 – 8:00pm EST; 8:00 – 11:00pm EST.