360DigitalInfluence

Seatguru.com released the results of their 2009 Traveler Survey this month and it contained some surprising and not so surprising results.  After polling about 1,600 travelers worldwide one thing was abundantly clear – airlines in America fall short of their international counterparts in almost every category from comfort to food to customer service. The fact that American Airlines (the group, not the brand) have the worst service in the world is a little surprising. It is surprising, not because I have noticed how amazing the service has been on my flights this year, but because as American’s we practically invented the standards of customer service. There is no country in the world that provides, and takes pride in, the level of customer service that our companies provide.

Another statistic revealed is that 53 percent of people generally feel safe on a plane. Suprisingly, out of that group, 26 percent of respondents felt the safest place on the plane is in the front while only 6 percent felt the back of the plane was the safest. While the FAA claims all seats are equally safe (or dangerous) a study by Popular Mechanics reviewed 36 years of NTSB crash data and seating charts and concluded passengers near the tail of a plane are almost 40 percent more likely to survive a crash than those in rows up front. Why anyone would think the safest place in the plane is the one that, in the event of an emergency, nose dives to the ground at several hundred miles an hour is beyond me. Everyone knows the back seat is safer than the front seat in a car. Why would it be any different in a plane?

What is not surprising is Airlines in America ranked the worst for food. If anyone has eaten on a plane recently this is of no surprise. I always wonder how something deemed edible can be so unlike food.