American Airlines will soon start scoring flight attendants on how well they serve customers, alongside a slew of other metrics that could create some significant friction between front-line workers and management at the Texas-based carrier.
As first reported by trusted aviation insider JonNYC on X, American Airlines has been building up data over the last 12 months to create individual scores that will pit flight attendants against their coworkers.
The scores are based on a variety of metrics, including Net Promoter Scores from flights that a crew member has worked, flight delays attributed to flight attendants, a so-called ‘operational contribution,’ and other data.
Although new to flight attendants at American Airlines, the concept is far from unique and is used at an increasingly long list of other international carriers around the world.
One of the biggest issues with these types of scoring systems, though, is that passengers rarely base their opinion on their experience with just one flight attendant, especially if the scores are based on a more general NPS metric.
An NPS survey will ask customers how likely they are to recommend a service or product to a friend or family member on a scale of 1 to 10. A customer who scores 9 or 10 is considered a ‘Promoter,’ someone who scores 7-8 is a ‘Passive,’ while anyone who scores 0 to 6 is classed as a ‘Detractor.’
To calculate the NPS score, you eliminate the Passives altogether and then subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.
The best score a company can get is +100, while the worst score is -100.
The average NPS score for the airline industry is somewhere between +35 and +45, although before Southwest radically changed its strategy, it was reported that the Dallas-based carrier once touted an exceptional NPS score of +71.
Using NPS to score individual employees is notoriously unreliable because customers are rating their overall experience and not the service provided by one or two people.
Within the airline industry, one failed interaction at a crucial touchpoint can bleed across the entire experience. Airlines now largely accept that a customer’s perception can be dramatically altered by just one touchpoint.
In 2019, for example, the then chief executive of TAP Air Portugal revealed that NPS scores swung from -40 to +56 with the introduction of newer airplanes, in-flight Wi-Fi, free messaging, and streaming content.
The flight attendants hadn’t changed, but passengers reported they were providing a better service.
A similar improvement was reported by Spanish flag carrier Iberia when it introduced its new Airbus A350 widebody jets on its flagship Madrid to New York JFK route in 2019, with the airline reporting a 10% bump in its NPS score.
What American Airlines is likely to argue is that even when other touchpoints aren’t quite perfect – a rolling maintenance delay, broken inflight Wi-Fi, passengers forced to gate check their hand luggage, a lack of availability of snacks and drinks, etc, this can all be saved by great customer service from flight attendants.
This type of argument will, however, ruin any trust that flight attendants have in this scoring system.
Unfortunately, it’s this type of variability from one flight to the next that makes rating flight attendants so difficult. Especially, when you add into the mix that one crew member could undo the good work of another flight attendant.
It’s also important to note that the sample size of these surveys is normally pretty poor. You might only get one or two passengers per flight, completing the NPS survey.
In 2023, Delta Air Lines tried to remove these problems from the equation by sharing the names of flight attendants with customers in pre-flight emails and asking them to rate individual crew members.
Although Delta flight attendants aren’t represented by a union, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) described the initiative as an “outrageous violation of privacy.”
