Frontier Airlines and the principle of customer surprise
My girlfriend recently started grad school in New York, so I’ve been flying quite a bit between there and Boulder. Because we live in the Golden Age of Credit Card Signup Bonuses, I tend to fly that route quite a bit Frontier. In waiting at all those gates, a dynamic of customer interaction has crystallized in my head, which I’ve taken to calling the principle of customer surprise.
You see, Frontier has this unique policy: tickets purchased on frontierairlines.com include a carry-on bag, whereas tickets purchased on Orbitz or Travelocity do not, even though they are usually the same price. Instead, they must pay for their carry-on bags, with more and more severe penalties the longer it takes for them to figure this out.
- While booking: $0 — Because you’d just go to frontierairlines.com
- When checking in online: $25
- When checking in at the counter: $50
- When at the departure gate: $100
Exacerbating this is the lack of clear messaging about this policy along the way, so if you don’t already know this policy, you’re likely to fall into that $100 category. Imagine your surprise arriving at the gate, with a reasonable 30 minutes until boarding, and being told that you can’t bring your laptop with you unless you pay $100. I’ve seen people literally (figuratively) losing their shit at gate agents.
Customers can handle surprise as long as it occurs within the range of things they consider normal. Customers might be irritated with flight delays, but no one is going to blow up at the gate agents over it. That special brand of customer ire is reserved for instances when the experience you provide falls completely outside their expectations.
On one hand, I sympathize with Frontier. Aggregators are going to take their cut through referrals, so they are within their right to provide an economic incentive to book directly. I’m sure they would love to warn people on Travelocity that they are going to get hit with this inevitable fee, but they probably don’t get the chance. And really, if we pay for checked bags shouldn’t we pay for carry-ons too? The status quo seems more arbitrary than Frontier’s policy.
Unfortunately, none of this matters. We get dealt the cards of our circumstances, and it’s up to us to design experiences that minimize adverse customer surprise.
How we apply this
By day (and let’s be honest, night too) I’m the CTO of Brandfolder, which my co-founders and I started about nine months ago.We started out with a completely free product, but recently launched a premium plan to test whether we can monetize our product.
In the final reckoning, we decided to make one feature that had previously been free and make it part of the paid tier, inviting the potential for adverse customer surprise. What we ended up deciding on was giving all users three months free of the paid tier, automatically, and to send them an email every month to let them know what we were doing (we even sent out a coupon for three free months for people who took our survey).
But there are other issues that we haven’t quite figured out yet. When we re-engineered our data model when moving from our MVP to our current product, we made it possible to link single brand assets to multiple Brandfolders. That said, we haven’t quite figured out how to design the communication and interaction with this situation, such that we minimize user surprise, and accordingly we haven’t realeased the feature. It’s something we continue to mull over, and ideas are always welcome at @rurabe.
Come on Frontier
So what could Frontier do here? If they are dead set on being different, make carry-on bags free for members of their frequent flyer program. Then instead of having gate agents absorb abuse from ten enraged customers per flight, they can spend that time capturing emails and addresses for new customers that they can then market to. I think it’s fair to say that those $100 fees they’re collecting are likely to be the last $100 they’ll ever see from that customer.
