Joshua Blankenship on the American Airlines/Dustin Curtis Thing

Interesting retort from Joshua Blankenship. I agree with him that Dustin Curtis’s original post regarding the AA.com website was flippant, to say the least. But Curtis isn’t the point. “Mr. X”, the UX designer whom American Airlines fired, isn’t the point.

The point is that American Airlines is clearly a failing company. They’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter. The experience of traveling on one of their flights is terrible. Their website is terrible. These facts are not unrelated.

How does this happen? It happens when a company is run by executives who don’t have taste and aren’t concerned about customer experience.

Update: Seriously, I don’t get this. Any airline should have two goals: make it easy and pleasant to book travel, and make it pleasant to be on their flights. AA sucks at both. Compare and contrast with JetBlue and Southwest.

★ Friday, 6 November 2009