New airline ticket and departure-gate agents are hard to find these days, says Budget Travel’s anonymous confessor.
“Not only are the wages awful, but flying for free — the one perk of the job — is becoming virtually impossible because planes are always packed with paying customers,†he told the magazine.
The anonymous confessor worked as both a ticket agent and a departure-gate agent for a major airline. He has since left the industry. No surprise with his experiences.
To save money, many airlines also aren’t giving new employees the same job training they once received, leaving inexperienced agents on the front line to deal with passenger complaints.
“Once, on a trip I took after I had stopped working as a ticket agent, I had to show a new hire where to look in the system to find my reservation — she had no idea what she was doing,†he said.
His airline had a very antiquated computer system.
“We had about a dozen operating systems in the company. There were separate systems for mapping flight routes, filing lost-luggage claims, and keeping track of reservations — but not all of them could relay data to each other. To top it all off, the computers at the departure gates didn’t have Internet access,†he said.
The popular belief among disgruntled travelers that gate agents purposely keep passengers in the dark about flight delays isn’t really true — sometimes the agent is the last one to know what’s going on.
Report by David Wilkening
