275 Minute Wait: Why Airline Customer Service Isn’t Standing Still?


“If you can’t plan something on your day off, it can get you down,” he said. Edison Fraseris the transportation coordinator of the International Union of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, a union that represents booking agents for Southwest Airlines.

Emirates, which employs 1,900 people to handle calls, says the median wait time to find a representative on the phone is just over six minutes. One of the companies, world’s largest airlinesEmails shared with The New York Times show achieve this by giving agents targets with a specific number of seconds to process various types of calls.

Holding a call for around 500 seconds, or 8.5 minutes, has become much more stressful during the pandemic, said a former Emirates booking agent, who asked not to be identified because her contract prohibited her from talking about her employer. Travelers expected him to answer questions such as: Would someone with a high infection rate from a particular country sit in my five rows? When they couldn’t answer, they shouted often.

He rarely did his metrics targets tied to bonuses and that’s why he quit.

“We are not machines,” he said. (An Emirates representative said these time targets are “benchmark values”, which are used “primarily for estimation purposes, to ensure we have sufficient resources to process requests from our customers”.)

That’s the plan for most airlines. But several industry analysts said it’s unlikely that travelers will see this plan translate into lower wait times anytime soon. They offered several theories as to why not.

The first theory is that hiring quickly is impossible because airlines such as restaurants and retailers are grappling with labor shortages. Southwest spokesman Dan Landson said the company has never had such a hard time filling jobs to support this theory. He said the company is trying to hire 1,000 agents, but instead of 80 applications per opening, which was a pre-pandemic standard, the company receives between 10 and 15 applications.

American, which has recently hired thousands of booking agents, bringing its total to 4,400 in the United States, said it’s also struggling to fill jobs, along with plans to hire more.



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