Want to Hold Onto Elite Status With Your Airline? It’s Going to Cost You.
I have friends who have been with their airlines for 10-20 years. They’ve been promoted through the ranks, attended in-flight entertainment events, been involved in major ground stops and a whole lot more. Then, one day, they’re “let go” and their time at the airline is over. The company hands them a pink slip and they simply walk out the door without so much as an apology.
It seems to me that I hear this story every time I talk to someone who has recently left an airline company. They tell me it is the worst experience of their life to see the company hand them a “non-permanent position” and tell them, “You’re out of our company. That’s it.”
They say, “You can’t imagine how bad it is.”
You can’t imagine how bad it is … how bad it really is. How bad it really is.
But here’s the thing: It’s bad for everyone involved. Everyone except the person who is let go.
Every time you read about someone who has been let go from an airline company, it’s like one more nail in the coffin of the passenger-first mentality that the airline industry is based upon.
It’s like putting a sign on your car that says, “Don’t use our car on the highway. It costs us a lot of money and you lose our right to sue us if something happens to your car.”
And yet, for every single airline employee who loses his or her job, there is another who gets a pink slip.
I have personally encountered this concept on several occasions and while I’m not an employee at one of the airlines I’ve been on extensively, this doesn’t make the situation any better. It just creates a greater sense of apathy, and fear, within a company who is now constrained to put value on the employees.
Sure, they have a contract with the company, just like any business.
