I’m back from vacation, but am unfortunately one of the people who has suffered due to the current troubles at US Airways. My outbound flight from San Francisco to Orlando (I went on a cruise, not to the Disney greater metropolitan theme park) was operated by United, codeshared with US Air. Unfortunately for me, the return flight was operated by US Air.
Our flight to Charlotte on Xmas afternoon was delayed almost an hour. We would’ve had only fifteen minutes to catch our flight to SFO, but, of course, that flight was delayed, too. Many US Air flights were cancelled, so a two hour delay maybe wasn’t so bad.
The reason for many of the delays and cancellations was that a lot of flight attendants and baggage handlers called in sick on Xmas day. One of the union leaders said it was not a union action, but that he thought it demonstrated bad planning by management. Uh, you tipped your hand with that lame explanation, buddy.
The sickout wasn’t the cause for our flight’s delay, though. Due to FAA rules, they can’t board passengers on a plane until the entire crew is present. We were missing one flight attendant, but not because of “sickness”. Earlier in the day, she had been riding in a van to an airport in the midwest. Her van hit a deer and turned over. Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt, but the delay caused her to miss her flight.
To the credit of the employees who did show up for work, every US Air employee I dealt with was friendly, helpful, and very professional. While I obviously don’t know the inside story of employee-corporate relations at US Air, I hope that all the flight attendants and baggage handlers who lied about being sick received a particularly nasty lump of coal in their Xmas stockings.
While we finally got to San Francisco at around 11 pm, our luggage did not. Eighteen hours later, I still don’t have it. However, according to US Air’s baggage locator automated speech app, it has been picked up by a delivery company and should be dropped off in the next couple of hours.
The speech app was pretty good. Not great, but good. At least it was a lot better than the US Air website. The website just had a form that you could submit. Six hours later and I still have not received a response to the request I submitted. The speech app gave me immediate feedback on the status of my bags.
The biggest problems with their speech app were:
- Too much text-to-speech. The worst case was when “got it” was TTS’d. Also, numbers sounded like they were either TTS’d or were poorly recorded.
- Did not recognize the “lost baggage” file reference number. It failed on two tries to understand the six-letter code, even though I spoke it very clearly and in a way that I have had very good success at work with our speech applications. Their app had to fall back on having me read one of the six-digit baggage claim numbers.
In the end, though, the speech app got the job done quickly and effectively. The web app was time consuming and, ultimately, useless. Speech apps 1 – web apps 0.