Booking a U.S. Flight? Simply Call India.

Last week, I called United Airlines to check my mileage balance in hopes of booking an impromptu award flight. I was calling in the wee hours, when phone traffic was presumably lower, and, as I had hoped, my call was quickly connected from the automated system to a real person. After several attempts at pronouncing both the dates of my proposed departure and the destination city (Toulouse), I realized that I had been connected to an operator in India. To be sure, it’s nothing new these days—American companies across the board are cutting costs by outsourcing to the Subcontinent, and the airlines are no exception.

Writes Laurie Berger in the Los Angeles Times:

US Airways and bankrupt United and Delta now send at least half of their U.S.-based callers overseas. (American, Continental, Northwest and Southwest still answer phones in the U.S. using on-site and home-based agents.)

The troubled carriers’ best customers—upper-elite frequent fliers and international passengers—get directed to “cream-of-the-crop” U.S. agents. Pretty much everyone else is sent to the airline equivalent of Siberia, in terms of customer service.

Despite a few difficulties with communication, my experience was positive during this particular call. When I asked the operator if she was in India, adding that I had visited the country and loved it, she admitted why yes, she was, and, by the way, “My name is not really Jenny.” We chatted briefly about my travels there before getting back to business.

Not all callers can claim such a chummy experience, however.

Jeri Bowden of McLean, Va., for one, said she spent eight lunch hours trying to redeem a paper upgrade through several India-based agents she couldn’t understand.

“I kept asking for someone who spoke English without an accent,” said Bowden, who registered her gripe on http://www.untied.com, a United complaint site. “I would have screamed, but I was at work.”

Experts say the frustration is understandable. It’s hard for Americans to “get past the clipped British accent” of Indian agents, said Virginia Mann, a UC Irvine speech scientist.

“Travelers are already under stress when they call,” she said. “When they can’t communicate with the person who’s supposed to be helping them, they explode.”

Maybe we Yanks could all use a course in the spoken Queen’s English. It would at least make it easier to understand the deadpan one-liners in the hilarious British version of “The Office”—and it just might help us book our next flight.

 

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