Bad news is better than no news
A couple of recent airport escapades had me siting around with no information. From my point of view what happened in the first one was:
0545 – check in luggage for 0645 flight
0645 – in line with over half of the travellers ticketed and on the stairs to the gate
0715 – everybody already ticketed gets un-ticketed – we are told to go and wait in the lounge for an announcement
0715-1030 – the board in the lounge shows “Wait in lounge”
1030 – announcement to go to gate
1100 – flight takes off
The pilot did explain the full sequence of events after we had boarded – and that actually made me feel a bit happier than spending over 3 hours with no clue what was going on. This is hardly profound customer service knowledge – keeping people informed of what to expect when, and then doing it, is a fairly straightforward tenet.
An estimated timescale would have meant that I could have worked more effectively for the 3 working hours that were created – like the time I was in Eugene, OR – and my plane was delayed by 8 hours – probably 8 of the most productive hours I ever had.
A simple old message. Set expectations and then meet them. Uncertainty is often worse than bad news, especially if the bad news is just unshared information.
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