Cloudy Future on the Service Front : Airlines: In the past, good service on our carriers was taken for granted. Today, passengers are mostly concerned with having a safe flight.

Item: A friend recently returned from a trip to Asia. He flew Japan Air Lines on the first half of his trip and United Airlines on the return.

All he could talk about was bad service on the United jet.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “On the way over to Asia I flew Japan Air Lines in coach. It seemed like every time someone used the lavatory, one of the flight attendants would slip in after the passenger exited, wipe off the toilet and clean the sink.

“But on my return flight I took United. The plane was filthy, the flight attendants didn’t seem to care and the bathrooms were disgusting. Why?”

Item: A flight attendant on TWA accidentally spilled coffee on a passenger’s shirt. The airline offered to pay for cleaning the shirt, but the passenger had to fill out a form and supply receipts.

Question: When was the last time you had truly good service on an airplane?

Unfortunately, the traveling public is redefining its view of service. In the past we seemed to expect good service. Today more and more travelers are simply hoping for a safe flight. More often than not they become conscious of service only when things go wrong.

Airline mergers, decreasing competition and rising costs have all combined to work against even the best efforts toward good service by employees at many airlines.

Then, too, many airlines have disbanded their small army of “redcoats,” supervisors who used to anticipate problems at the airport gate and fix them.

A few carriers, such as Delta and American, have retained their “special services” staff. These folks do a great job of accommodating passengers with problems.

Has good service become an impossible dream?

Not necessarily. Some airlines have begun to change their attitudes toward service.

A few years back, SAS was one of those airlines suffering from a bad service image. Management was centralized, contact with passengers was limited and lines of authority were strictly defined within the organization. Passenger satisfaction was at an all-time low.

Then a new management team, headed by Jan Carlzon, took over. Carlzon seemed to identify the problems immediately.

He moved quickly to solve the problem. “We need to be an airline that recognizes that the customer is right, that we are not fighting him, we are serving him,” he said.

In a sense, what Carlzon was saying was that for the airline to succeed, it had to be customer-driven.

Carlzon decided to reorganize management philosophy to give the airline employees with the most public contact--gate and ground agents, flight attendants and reservations agents--much more responsibility to fix problems when they happened.

As a result, SAS flight attendants don’t distribute lengthy forms to fill out if a problem occurs, they just solve it. If a flight is delayed, there is no argument about a connecting flight or, in the case of missed connections, providing overnight accommodations.

To succeed with his program, Carlzon had to deprogram his staff. And he had to let the front-line airline people know that he would support their decision-making in the field. Unless it was an outrageous decision, it would not be reviewed.

The plan has worked splendidly. Passenger satisfaction with SAS turned around in 18 months (that’s considered very fast), and employee morale zoomed at the same time.

But you don’t have to be a big airline to worry about happy passengers and staff morale. Chairman Richard Branson directly monitors the performance of many of his Virgin Airways flights between London and the United States on a regular basis. And last year, when a few of his planes were delayed getting to London, Branson drove out to Gatwick Airport to meet deplaning passengers and apologize personally.

Midway Airlines, the Chicago-based carrier, has begun Project New Attitude. Modeled after the SAS approach, the PNA program is beginning to work wonders at an airline that already scores high on most passenger surveys.

“We’re in the most competitive marketplace,” said Lois Gallo, Midway’s vice president of passenger service. “It’s absolutely necessary that we strongly embrace the service imperative.”

The PNA program is mandatory for all Midway staff, and supervisors are put through the program four times.

In its simplest form Project New Attitude is a deprogramming program. “It lets the staff know that they can and should make decisions that help passengers when problems occur, even if it costs the company money,” Gallo said. “In the long run, if we keep a passenger happy, he’ll come back. If we lose him, we’ll lose his friends, and if he’s a corporate executive, even his company.”

Specifically, it lets Midway’s staff know that some rules and regulations can be broken. For example, an unaccompanied minor missed a connection, the last flight out from a Midway city.

“The gate agent used her brain,” said Gallo. “She called the boy’s parents, explained the situation, and asked if it would be all right to take him home with her. The parents could not have been more pleased.”

Another case: A woman flying to a business meeting in Chicago was informed upon arrival that a close relative had died. She stayed on the plane and returned to Iowa. The flight crew, noticing her on their same flight, asked what had happened.

“They were so upset that she had spent her money and wouldn’t get to take her trip,” Gallo said, “that they just gave her a free ticket to use later. They didn’t ask. They just did it.”

At Lufthansa a modified SAS approach is used. “Some airlines want to separate the cockpit staff from the flight attendants,” says Dieter Uchtdorf, Lufthansa’s senior vice president for flight operations and the airline’s chief pilot. “This doesn’t work for us. We need to work together as a team.”

All 2,500 members of the cockpit crews and 7,000 members of the cabin crews at Lufthansa report to Uchtdorf. “If the pilot has a delay, the flight attendants should know about it. If a passenger has a problem, the captain needs to know so the problem can be solved.”

Some airline staff members, especially supervisors, are worried that unethical travelers will try to take advantage of the new program.

“We tell our people to use their best judgment,” Gallo said. “We believe in the honesty of our passengers, and we also believe they deserve to have a great flight. Our people now know they have the responsibility as well as the authority to assure that.”