Association of European Airlines Firms Up Customer Service Commitments

World Airline News, May 18, 2001

Group Says Airlines Allowed to Tailor Guidelines to Specific Needs

The Association of European Airlines (AEA) released its long-awaited list of Customer Commitments on May 10, and now attention shifts to how many airlines will endorse the commitments and how they will implement them.

The 14 commitments announced by AEA offer more detail than a list of headings released previously but are still general in nature (WAN, May 11). Their true impact will depend on the service plans that each airline signing the commitments must develop.

"We firmly believe that a framework approach [that] airlines can adapt to their own service profiles is appropriate to an industry where airlines compete vigorously on service and price," said AEA Secretary General Karl-Heinz Neumeister in a statement.

A number of AEA members such as British Airways have already expressed support for commitments. European Commission (EC) officials have said that they will withold customer rights legislation if the airline industry developes acceptable voluntary standards.

The service plans will be delivered to the EC when they have been developed, and airlines must implement staff training programs. Some questions remain open, such as how the commitments and service plans will be monitored and how the signing process will work.

An AEA spokesman told World Airline News that the EC is watching very closely which airlines sign up to the commitments. Although AEA member airlines are expected to sign the commitments, regulators want to see low-cost carriers and charter carriers sign, too. "There is no problem with the majors, but [the EC] has made it clear that this will not be good enough," the AEA spokesman said. "There has to be a broad spectrum [of signatories]." >TK