Dealing with Complaints: The Airtours Way

Returning from our first Commercial Weekender, I was slightly surprised when my PA, Janet, handed me a fax from the Operations Director detailing complaints that had been made about us by both the airline and hotel divisions.

The airline’s complaint was probably fair enough. Apparently, nobody had thought to tell them that we were using an Empty Leg flight to transport a load of Airtours commercial people away for the weekend, which had understandably caught the flight crew slightly off guard. The complaint from the hotel division was rather more amusing. Seamus had apparently rearranged the letters on the Reps notice board into something inappropriate, which hardly seemed like a hanging offence to me.

So, I demonstrated what was probably the Airtours approach to complaints at the time. I turned the fax over, wrote “F**k Off” on the back and faxed it straight back to Andrew.

Funny looking back, but unfortunately it also summed up quite a lot about the culture of Airtours in those early days.

We were an incredibly commercial business. We worried about aircraft utilisation, hotel commitments, load factors, margins and selling every last holiday we had committed to. Customer satisfaction came considerably further down the list. In many ways, we were probably the package holiday equivalent of what Ryanair subsequently became to the low-cost airline community.

We did measure complaints, but primarily because we wanted to know how much they were costing us. What we were much less interested in was why people were complaining in the first place and whether we should actually change something.

Paul Evans, for example, continued guaranteeing notoriously bad properties such as the Bell Vue in Alcudia and Club Praia da Rocha in the Algarve, because they were massive properties offering large numbers of cheap beds, so commercially they worked. The inconvenient fact that year after year the evidence told us that many of our customers hated them didn't seem to matter enough.

In hindsight, I think this was probably Airtours' biggest weakness.

At one stage we had a ridiculous complaint ratio of around 7%. That doesn't initially sound catastrophic because 93% of customers haven't complained. But compound that number over several years and suddenly you have created a very large pool of people who have travelled with Airtours, had a bad experience and decided never to travel with you again.

Our “stack it high and sell it cheap” mentality allowed Airtours to grow at an incredible rate. We were entrepreneurial, aggressive and moved far faster than the dusty giant that was Thomson. That culture created much of Airtours' success, but unfortunately it also created some of the problems that eventually became embedded in the brand.

Most former Airtours people, myself included, tend to look back at those years through slightly rose-tinted glasses. We remember the incredible growth, entrepreneurial freedom, great characters and the sheer fun of taking on Thomson and beating them at their own game. Much of that pride is entirely justified.

But there is another side to the story.

Sometimes we treated customers like battery hens, herding enormous numbers of people through airports and into oversized holiday prison camps because commercially it suited us.

I am certainly not ashamed of those Airtours years. I loved the business and still do. But with the benefit of hindsight, I just wish Peter Rothwell had arrived a few years earlier and opened our eyes to what we were doing.

Because being brilliant at selling customers a holiday is not much use if, once they have experienced it, they never want to buy another one from you.