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2008
Soap Box Archives Bad Business We usually travel by bus, but sometimes the distances involved dictate that we have to fly to our concert dates as was the case this week when we did a show in San Diego. The flight out from Nashville was no problem, but I happened to be watching a news channel the day before our flight back home and heard about American Airlines canceling hundreds of flights and decided to check it out. And it's a good thing I did, because our flight from San Diego to Dallas had been cancelled. OK, I can live with that, I certainly don't want to get on an unsafe airplane, but the problem I have is that they didn't notify us or thousands of other passengers that our planes were not going to fly, which is the least they could have done. If I had not caught the news report about the cancellations, we would have gone to the airport the next morning to find that we were stuck there. Flying has gotten
to be like rolling dice, you don't know what's going to come up. Even
if the flight is not cancelled, you may sit at the gate or on the tarmac
for a good while. Even if something is wrong with the plane at the gate,
they won't tell you about it until they've processed your ticket and
you're on the plane, not giving you a chance Much of the airline industry in America is in dire straits, with the out of control fuel prices and other economic pressures, it seems they would be straining every nerve to make flying as attractive as possible, but they just don't seem to see it that way. American Airlines has lost a lot of money this week, not to mention the public relations disaster it has been for them and the economy has suffered a setback it certainly doesn't need. There were four or five television satellite trucks sitting on the curb outside American Airlines at the San Diego airport when we rode by, I guess to document the anger of the passengers who had not been notified about the cancellation of their flights. Now I don't know much about big business and certainly couldn't run one the size of an airline company, but something I do know is that you can't keep treating people like cattle and expect them to keep doing business with you. I realize that the grounding of the planes was a government decision and beyond the airline's control, but they should at least have the common courtesy to let people know that their flights have been cancelled in time for them to make other arrangements. There is no telling how many important business meetings didn't take place or how many funerals were not attended, how many sick relatives were not visited, how many troops who have been away from home for a year or more were delayed in seeing their loved ones, how much mail and how many packages were not delivered on time. It's simply bad business.
Pray for our troops. What do you think? God Bless America Charlie Daniels
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