Cheap Travel Guide

Upside down, backwards, and out of control . . .

In the spirit of being fair to readers, I thought I should let people know what what to look for as well as what to avoid. For airline travel, I covered the what-to-look-for in the Jet Blue article below. On the other hand, you may want to avoid Continental after reading the story about the Continental flight from Caracas to Newark a couple of weeks ago. You can read the story on the Elliott First Aid For Travel blog.

Continental has a Customer First program which states:”Continental Airlines is dedicated to providing a level of service to our customers that makes us a leader in the airline industry today. We understand that to do this we need to have a product we are proud of and employees who like coming to work everyday. Objective evidence shows that we are leading the industry in customer service.”

I should mention that Jet Blue had a similar fiasco with unreasonably treated passengers recently and it resulted in the CEO/Founder apologizing and realizing he needed to step down.

True to their characters, Jet Blue stepped up and Continental is unlikely to do so.

You should also note in these false imprisonment fiascoes that the airlines are not alone in their incompetence. The airport managers who don’t help by opening a gate or getting buses out to unload passengers are also complicit.

Every company in the world will mess up once in a while or inherit a situation not of their own making. It’s how they react to it that matters most.

Continental has flights into Burlington from Boston and Newark. Good luck.

(c) 2007 Jeff Connor Grunberg Haus

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