[eunice]

Dear Mr. Fornaro,

Your mission statement is “Innovative people dedicated to delivering the best flying experience to smart travelers. Every day.” Yet it is quite contradictory to my personal experience with your company. I have never received such atrocious customer service from a company and I believe your management and employees have been unresponsive and unsatisfactory to my minimal expectations as a customer.
I checked-in online the day before my flight out of La Guardia Airport (LGA) in New York and had arrived the next day two-hours early from an hour-long bus ride, to receive the news of a delay in my flight due to bad weather conditions. I understand natural causes occur, however I did not appreciate the fact that your employees had known about the delay hours before I had arrived and failed to notify me and everyone else on the flight. Because your company refused to offer complimentary hotel services, my friends and I drew together a number of chairs in the terminal cafeteria to have a place to sleep along with the other passengers. If this is your idea of “courtesy,”—as stated as one of your guiding principles—then I believe we hold different viewpoints of its definition.
After complaining about the long delays and explaining to the agent that my friends and I needed to immediately get back to Los Angeles for school and work, the $25 voucher your company had provided seemed to be consistent with your value of “acting with purpose and urgency” until we had actually redeemed them. As our connecting flight was to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (HAIA), I had specifically asked one of your employees if my friends and I could pay for our luggage fees altogether—including your $49 overweight baggage rate—in order to redeem the vouchers as they were only a one-time use despite any remaining balance on the voucher. In return, your employee had disregarded my request and instead, made an error that no longer entitled us to use the full value of the voucher. I had received those vouchers for the poor customer service I had already encountered yet they were unusable due to another dissatisfying point of service, as your employee did not comply with my requests. Your company’s actions have not only gone against your values of “respectful communication and constructive disagreement,” “personal responsibility for resolving issues,” and “acting with purpose and urgency,” but also in opposition to your guiding principles of “anticipation” and again, “courtesy.”
From HAIA, I took another connecting flight to the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (TMA). If it was not already inconvenient enough by having to be rerouted to HJAIA—400 miles more than the distance between TMA and LGA—I was given the wrong gate number by one of your flight attendants for my final flight home. I had checked the flight schedule list in her hand, noticed there were two flights back to Los Angeles, and realized she carelessly picked one of the two gate numbers to inform me with. Had I not been a ‘smart traveler’ and become wary of your company, I would have missed my flight, leading to a possible job loss for not arriving to Los Angeles on time. Your company’s value of “honesty, trust and integrity” and “hard work” has been lost behind the recklessness and unscrupulousness of your workers.
In this day and age, Internet reviews and word-of-mouth of someone’s experience with a company can influence another’s action. I write this letter not only to express my negative experience with your company, but also to inform others that your mission statements are misleading, as I would not want future passengers to experience what I had to go through with AirTran Airways. As I did not expect to receive a refund for my plane ticket based on the prior experiences with your company, I at least anticipated an apology from one of your representatives, which I did not receive. I wish the best for your company as I hope you will stop misleading your customers by complying with your current mission statement.

Eunice Na
Dissatisfied AirTran Airways Customer