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Comment by kayson | Hacker News Reader

Have they ever? It's not like they're known for their service at all. They're domestic carriers trying to fly international. Business class on a European or Asian carrier is a totally different experience. Not to mention the opulence of some of the Middle Eastern ones.

I got super lucky once and got to fly first class on points to east Asia via Asiana and ANA and holy shit the level of service is just out of this world. You get personal service from airport to airport, including an employee (or sometimes even more than one) escorting you from lounge to gate. The catering was among the best food I've ever had, and they turn down your seat and give you pajamas. In retrospect I'm especially impressed because I was a dumb twenty-something year old with no business being in a first class cabin.

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That kind of decadence is just silly though. Being a great airline has nothing to do with having a personal valet and the best meal in your life.

Being a great airline means keeping schedules, not losing luggage, and not squeezing coach passengers with that last inch of space lost, handling errors gracefully, and generally being clean and competent.

That's the low bar, but I think it is entirely possible to do that and have great customer service on top of it. Domestic flights in America, yeah, just be on time and ideally not overbooked. But what if the seats were comfortable, or the staff was kind and not overworked? We could have both.

US airlines were the best in the world in the 1960s. So what happened?

Unions...

err, most other parts of the world were still recovering from a lil war?

In 1978, airlines were deregulated. That triggered a race to the bottom.

Absolutely ridiculous to try to blame unions.

Neither ANA nor Asiana (from the GP comment) are regulated, yet they still have dramatically better service. That goes for most (if not all?) of the best airlines in the world.

I'm not saying that GP is right, but it's equally facile to blame the difference on "deregulation".

For whatever it's worth, in my experience, the staff of non-US airlines are dramatically better at their jobs. It's comical how bad the service is on US carriers, even for business and first class on long-haul routes.

I imagine being an airline employee pays better relative to the local jobs when you come from a non-US country. Air travel is generally geared towards a richer clientele, and the absolute costs don't really drop even when the countries involved are less wealthy, so I can see how that would mean there's more money / margin floating around airlines than traditional businesses, so they can attract a better class of employee

Maybe? Standard of living is pretty high in Singapore, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, all of whom have vastly better air travel experiences than the US.

My inclination is that it's just linked to an overall decline in service across the board in the US. Even something as pedestrian as Starbucks or Tullys in Japan and Korea is a different class of customer experience than here.

(The US isn't alone in this, of course -- the worst flight I've ever had was on a Spanish airline, and most European discount airlines are miserable. But you sort of expect that when "discount" is in the name of the service...)

It absolutely was deregulation, combined with a pressure to compete, which got American airlines to their current state.

Every single airline on this list, except for ANA, is a flag carrier or directly state-owned. America has no flag carrier and all of our airlines are in a knife fight with each other that just leaves them all barely functional.

Asiana was not a "flag carrier". In fact, it went bankrupt and was put up for sale in 2019. [1] KAL has committed to buying Asiana, but it hasn't happened yet.

Korean airlines is the "flag carrier" of Korea, but there are lots of others, and all of them are preferable to US service. As for Japan, ANA is a private company and AFAICT, always was. JAL was the "national airline" of Japan, but fully privatized in the late 80s, and is now smaller than ANA.

Just for another example: Taiwan's "flag carrier" is China Air (which is mediocre), but EVA (which is private) provides excellent service.

[1] https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2019/04/694_267194.h...

Why are you even talking about Asiana? They're not on the top ten list at all. Korean Airlines is.

I also literally said "except for ANA".

Edit: Oh, sorry, I see - GP mentioned Asiana. I'm talking about the list in the actual article that's linked, which I think I made very clear?

Because that is what I mentioned in my first post, and what the top of thread comment was talking about.

Considering that a good chunk of the best airlines in the world are unionized I’m guessing you came up with the conclusion as your first step.

The big difference, actually, is deregulation.

See above. It seems you came up with the conclusion as your first step as well.

There are airlines on this top list with unionised staff.

Today milk in my fridge has gone off, fucking cow unions!

If you live in Montana that might be a fairish complaint. Though it's the farmers and they don't bother with a union they just control the marginal seats.

> Unions...

MBA style management focusing on short-term economics and management bonusses seems more likely to me. I don's see how treating employees well leads to poor service and quality.

There's a story about an AA Exec who figured they could save $1m by cutting the number olives in a first class martini from 3 to 2. It's often used as an example of how attention to detail can deliver amazing savings that don't effect service. But here's the thing. As a person who occasionally travels first or business class, if you want to charge 3-5x for 50% extra space might be best not to count the olives.

Yes, exactly. You've got a group of people who drive most of the profit margin for your product because they seek luxury, and you intend to nickel-and-dime that group? How does this make sense?

If that story isn't apocryphal, it should be taught in business schools as an example of missing the forest for the trees. It's like an executive at FedEx "figuring out" that they can save 1% of their costs by reducing the reliability of overnight delivery, or an executive at Mercedes "figuring out" that they can shave costs by using plastic leather.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's a great way to destroy a brand with pound-foolish thinking.

Virgin Atlantic has among the best service in the world and is unionized. The problem is more management that doesn’t give a shit provided they can squeeze you for another ancillary fee.

You get down voted but it's true.

The reason people believe Japanese cars (specifically the ones built in Japan) are built better is because the employees are not unionized combined with traditional beliefs about the Japanese refusing to half ass anything.

Unions exist to allow people to be lazier than they would otherwise be able to be. This is great from the perspective of the worker, but from the perspective of the consumer, unionized or companies are generally not going to treat them as well...

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