YakShaving

On Sunday, after an exhausting but fun trip to New York to visit my friend in his final year of law school (and go to the Indian Business conference at Columbia), I hopped on a bus to take me back to La Guardia airport. Thus began one of the worst little travel escapades I have ever experienced.

The M60 bus was packed like a can of sardines. Upon Nabeel’s advice, I took the single seat to the right of the bus so I could stow my luggage beside me, but there were still tons of people around me. After hearing some lady give caution to the guy in front of me that some miscreant was rifling through his bag, I quickly wrapped my arm around my laptop bag and held it close.

I had left for the airport with plenty of time before my flight. The M60 bus, which usually takes 45 minutes from Morningside Heights took 1.5 hours because it was delayed at every single stop– People would try to fit on the bus though there was no room, while the bus driver warned them that there was no space. Apparently they didn’t care.

Anyway, the bus ride wasn’t that bad. I want to talk more about a particularly awful experience with a company/brand. I don’t want to be negative, but it’s an interesting case study in brand experience that I was thinking about after Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of Orange answered a question about brand ambassadors.

Delta Airlines has sub-brands, such as Delta Connection and Delta Shuttle. Seemingly, there is no tangible difference in the look/feel of the two different brands. In some executive MBA marketing class somewhere, the brand manager for Delta Airlines sat down and heard that it is important to make a coherent brand experience across all their offerings. Which is fine. Heck, it’s likely more cost efficient for the company. Now, from a patron’s point of view, simply identifying which airline I am taking, and thus identifying WHICH terminal I need to get to is ridiculously difficult. I asked someone on the bus and she told me to go to the first terminal, after I told her that I was flying to Chicago. “All Chicago Delta flights are from the first terminal” she said, confidently.

After I got in, went to ticketing, I randomly bumped into a Delta representative (luckily) who looked at my ticket and barked that I was at the wrong terminal. “Get on the bus that takes you to terminal A– No! Take a cab if you can.. Otherwise you will miss it”. I ran down, shared a cab with someone (LUCKILY I had just enough cash and shared with someone– the cabs don’t take credit cards)… and ran in to just barely make my flight. I was no longer able to check my bag in– So I had to throw out all of my toiletries. The La Guardia airport TSA personnel are quite possibly the worst customer service brand ambassadors ever, by the way. Suffice it to say, it was an awful travel experience overall.

Whose fault is this? Delta Airlines, or Laguardia airport’s? Is it really possible that NO employees… or loyal customers of Delta… have ever indicated the difficulty to Delta?

I can’t imagine that La Guardia airport is the only airport which has this problem.   Why would Delta leave it to their brand ambassadors– their employees, citizens of New York familiar with the airport layout, and airport/TSA personnel– to educate me that there are multiple terminals for the SAME airline?

How could this problem be solved?  What if they just sent me a text message the morning of the flight that told me which terminal I had to go to?   What if their subbrand was differentiated enough so as to not be confused with Delta?   So that the busdriver would shout out “Delta, Terminal B…. (Sub-brand name goes here), Terminal A”.

Would this really be all that difficult?