Virgin Australia Listens and Responds

When I ask people if they are proactive with providing feedback to organisations a common response is, “What’s the point? They won’t listen to me anyway so I don’t bother doing it. If I can, I just take my business elsewhere.”

You may have been following my recent experience with Virgin Australia. You can review the story here if you like. While it took some time from start to finish, Matt Dixon from the Office of the CEO at Virgin Australia did a wonderful job in recognising the seriousness of my issue, respecting his fellow Virgin Australia team members by investigating their side of my experience and even exploring my issue beyond the boundaries of Virgin Australia.

My original purpose for contacting Virgin Australia was to ensure that poor passenger behaviour be managed appropriately.

The outcome of my feedback is that the crew involved in the flight have been re-trained in following existing Virgin Australia procedures as they relate to managing unruly passengers. In addition, by the end of July all Virgin Australia crew will have received re-training on this issue.

A final outcome is that the passenger at the centre of my experience is now known to all domestic airlines and the relevant authorities. It is safe to say that this person will not be flying in Australia for some time.

The point of sharing this story with you is to highlight that it is worth providing feedback to organisations when the issue is one that really concerns you. No doubt Virgin Australia does need to improve on its systems and processes so that issues such as mine don’t require the intervention of the Office of the CEO for them to be resolved. Ultimately that is one of the purposes of such an office and I give Virgin Australia credit for having a system where issues such as mine can be resolved at that level when the rest of the system fails.

Hopefully passengers will not be at risk of having a similar in flight experience to myself. That is the outcome that I had hoped would be achieved and Virgin Australia have proved, ultimately that they were prepared to listen and credit should be given where it is due.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com