

Chief Lying Officer - A lie should make you look better, not worse. - troupe
http://www.productivity501.com/chief-lying-officer/8828/

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reduxredacted
I saw two comments when I clicked the comment link:

TWAndrews: _I think most people would be more enraged by "we're going to delay
your flight because it's less profitable for us" than "Oops, wow, we screwed
up."_

Symmetry: _I wonder if they had to tell a lie because switching which
passengers had to wait would have violated some FAA regulation?_

My dad was a pilot (between "Commercial" and "General Aviation"). The first
comment, I thought: "Well, that's why the airlines lie about this sort of
thing". The second: "If there isn't a regulation in place, and companies were
more transparent about this sort of thing, there'd be enough anger to result
in a regulation".

I recall a huge uproar a while back because of an airline having an unusual
number of weather delays, which (at the time, not sure if this is still true)
meant that they had no responsibility to pay for passengers lodging.

Here's the thing: The few customers who are very regular travelers manage to
squeak out a voucher (they either know how to hack the system or can rely on
their _platinum_ status) and the infrequent remaining, especially leisure,
travelers are angry and vow never to fly with that airline again. The problem
is, if you work for a reasonably large company that has a Corporate
Bookings/Travel department, you are _not_ the airline's customer. At my
company, if I travel, I am required to take the least expensive flight as
determined by our booking system or travel agency service with very little
wiggle room. If I want a direct flight (and I always do), where I live, it's
guaranteed to be the same airline 90% of the time. I'm glad for this, I don't
mind that one airline, but the other 10% of the time it's an airline I
positively _hate_. In addition, the booking systems prices are almost always
more what I can find doing a simple search on my own (I had a flight that
would have cost $400 via Expedia but the least I could find on our booking
service was $1400).

On top of all of that, one of the prime reasons we use a custom booking
service is because they include a custom company hotline for sorting out these
exact problems. I'm not going to say "conflict of interest", because their
customer service division worked out a huge mess at 1:00 AM involving a missed
flight and later missing luggage that saved me having to stay an additional
several days a small town in Montana, but all of this ends up making the
person the airline answers to either the booking service or the applicable
federal regulation. Neither are my top choice.

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TWAndrews
I think most people would be more enraged by "we're going to delay your flight
because it's less profitable for us" than "Oops, wow, we screwed up."

~~~
astine
Would you prefer to fly with greedy corporate pigs or incompetent screw-ups?
The OP clearly prefers the pigs (as would I, actually.)

------
guimarin
Or we could simply start treating consumers like Adults. I would prefer the
honest truth even if I didn't like it, to a lie that defers my emotions onto
unrelated targets.

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Symmetry
I wonder if they had to tell a lie because switching which passengers had to
wait would have violated some FAA regulation?

------
Bud
This is great stuff. I've often encountered corporate lies like this, which
caused me to wonder, "Ok, I get that they feel they need to lie to me. But
couldn't they at least tell a lie that doesn't blatantly insult my
intelligence or make them look like bigger idiots than necessary? Aren't they
smart enough to do that, if they are smart enough to figure out the need to
lie?"

