Due to our recent fiasco with Jet Blue, I wrote a letter via their 'official' complaint form online. Here's what I wrote:
My departure was 5 hours late on the day before Thanksgiving due to a dead battery. As such, my wife and I missed the Letterman show, something we had been looking forward to for months and was one of the main reasons for going to New York in the first place. In other words, because of Jet Blue, our trip was literally ruined. Even more appalling than the glaring oversight of a dead battery was how Jet Blue tried to make up for it: a voucher for the amount we paid for our one-way tickets. This is nothing more that a marketing ploy: a voucher is nice, but I will have to spend MORE money with Jet Blue to actually go anywhere. My experiece was terrible. As a young person, I will have many more flights to take in the future and could potentially be a very loyal customer. This is not how to get such a loyalty started.
And lo and behold, they wrote back:
Dear Mr. Davidson,Thank you for contacting us regarding your recent JetBlue flight. We appreciate this opportunity to address your concerns.
We apologize for the inconveniences our delay caused you. At JetBlue we make every possible effort to operate on schedule. However, once in a while, a maintenance issue makes it necessary to delay or even cancel flights. As always, our foremost consideration in these cases is the safety of our customers. We sincerely regret that we were unable to operate your flight as scheduled.
As you already are aware, as an expression of our apology, each customer on your flight was given a voucher equal to the amount paid for their one way flight as compensation. This is done so that our customers may be inclined to travel JetBlue again and have a more positive experience.
In order to remain true to our value of integrity all customers are given the same compensation as to be fair to everyone. We regret if you do not agree with the compensation issued but we can only be responsible for circumstances within our control. In your case, it turns out a crewmember made a mistake and left the plane electronics on after landing which caused the battery to die. For this reason we can compensate everyone to the amount they paid us for their flights. Beyond this all our customers have different circumstances and we can not be responsible for compensating every person for their individual inconveniences as everyone's circumstance is different.
We truly value as JetBlue customers and hope that you will use the vouchers in the spirit that they were intended. We look forward to welcoming you onboard again and to providing you with a renewed and positive JetBlue experience.
Sincerely,
Nick
Customer Commitment
JetBlue Airways
Crewmember 30151
This once again shows that socialism is a bad idea. As an American, I fully expected to be given more than other customers as a reward for being loud. But I wasn't. This is why I like Southwest: sure we're all 'equally' not assigned seats, but those of us who check in early or show up to the airport the day before our flight or borrow some kids are allowed to board first.