easyJet: Low Cost, Great Customer Care

As I was invited to speak at an IT channel conference in February 2010 in Monte Carlo…I would have expected acceptable weather, certainly not so much snow that Nice airport was totally closed for a whole day, stranding thousands of passengers for up to three nights! I was one of those passengers who didn’t make it out of Nice Cote d’Azur on that particular Thursday, the 11^th of February.

As I entered the overcrowded terminal, I already knew all flights were cancelled and I was wondering how I was going to be treated by a low cost airline such as easyJet in circumstances that they could have easily qualified as ‘extraordinary‘, a denomination that -under IATA and EU regulations- would have allowed them to leave us to cope for ourselves.

We were quickly ushered towards a rather long line of people waiting to re-book their seats on the next available flight -in my case a flight to Paris Orly. As I finally got to the counter, I was offered a return on…Saturday morning at 07:30AM…we were Thursday! I was then told to go and queue at another counter (they quickly improved the organization so that further passengers only had to queue once), where I was given a hotel voucher for two nights, including three meals, and two taxi vouchers to get to and from the hotel.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and funnily enough I had just given a talk on ‘Cloud Computing’…in this case, the silver lining was that my wife and I were able to visit Nice, stay in a great hotel right in the center of the city, have a look at the opening parade of the famous Caranaval de Nice and have a fine breakfast and two great meals at the hotel’s very good restaurant.

I have to say that we were even surprised to see that there was no restriction to the price of our meals. Being cost conscious passengers, we avoided lashing out on expensive dishes or wine to avoid drawing even more on EasyJet’s generosity, but we could have, and some of our neighbors did…

This goes to prove that in EasyJet’s mind, low cost doesn’t necessarily mean low customer service and they deserve full recognition for the way they handled things. To me, this was a real moment of truth, as described in a book by the former CEO of SAS, the Scandinavian airline. It’s just that nowadays, as for any European flight, flying from Paris to Nice is no big deal and millions of people spend more time in an overcrowded train every morning and every evening and don’t expect to be offered a free meal or even find a seat.

It would be interesting to know how the major airlines treated their passengers who were stranded in Nice on Februrary 11^th…so let’s see those comments!

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