Do the right thing

Question: In the spring I booked two sets of flights. One on United Airlines to Europe for my husband, 11-year-old daughter and me and a second trip on AirTran from LAX to Atlanta for the three of us and for my 27-year-old daughter (who was traveling from Denver on the same dates and times to meet us in Atlanta). Both sets of tickets were nonrefundable. My older daughter became ill in May and died eight weeks later. Obviously, losing a child is devastating, and we had and have no desire to travel anywhere. When I contacted United, even though my deceased daughter was not on our itinerary, within two weeks, I received a complete refund. AirTran, on the other hand, refunded my deceased daughter’s airfare but not ours. I was told I had one year to use the tickets and they would not, under any circumstances, give me a refund. Can you help?

Maggie Jacobs

West Hills

Answer: Let’s cut to the chase: Jacobs is getting a refund, said Judy Graham-Weaver, manager of public relations for AirTran Airways. And she apologized for “any inconvenience” (a phrase, incidentally, that needs to be banned from the book of customer service blather for all occasions.)

That leaves only one question: Should Jacobs really have received a refund?

Customer service experts I heard from were of two minds.

Chris Ramey, chairman of the Luxury Marketing Council Florida, wrote in an e-mail, “Businesses must have rules and standards for difficult situations. There have to be limitations.. . . . In this case, in my opinion, it was fair and compassionate for the airline to refund one ticket and credit three tickets. ‘Not feeling like it’ isn’t enough reason to refund all three tickets.”

Alan Weiss, president of Summit Consulting Group, which lists among its clients Hewlett-Packard, GE and Mercedes-Benz, said in an e-mail, “Of course the airline should have bent the rules. There are going to be a lot of companies that will suffer when the economy inevitably rebounds because they are treating everyone so poorly at the moment. People don’t forget.”

So who’s right?

Both, depending on the airline’s core value.

“Is it operational efficiency or is it customer intimacy?” asked Anirudh Kulkarni, founder and head of Customer Value Partners, a customer relationship consulting firm.

“You can do one or the other really, really well, but you can’t do both really, really well.”

In the end, he thinks the solution is a no-brainer: Do what it takes to maintain the customer relationship, either by giving a refund or by extending the time period in which the credit for the ticket can be used.

Organizations, he noted, need to be mindful these days of how quickly bad word of mouth can spread. Today, stories go viral faster than a cold in a kindergarten class.

If your organization won’t bend, he said, “you have just guaranteed you are going to be on the dust heap -- it’s only a matter of when.”

So being compassionate is not only the right thing but it’s also the smart thing.

I think we knew that. I think United knew that. The only question now: Why didn’t AirTran?

--

Have a travel dilemma? Write to travel@latimes.com.