Air Canada announces loyalty program change amid news of poor customer satisfaction
Air Canada shared some good news today, announcing that it will be abandoning its partnership with Aeroplan and launching its own loyalty rewards program in 2020—a move it hopes will strengthen relationships with its customer base.
The bad news, however, is that the need for Air Canada to fortify relationships with its customers just went up even more.
According to the results of a survey conducted by J.D. Power, Air Canada has the second-lowest customer satisfaction rates of all North American airlines. The survey graded airlines with a score out of 1,000. The average score handed out was 756. Air Canada's was 709.
While Air Canada's score did improve from last year—something it noted when contacted by CBC News—so did everyone else's. The cumulative average jumped 30 points from its 2016 total.
The survey polled over 11,000 people who flew between March 2016 and March 2017, asking for input on categories such as prices, the check-in/boarding process, inflight services, frills, etc.
Leading the pack was Alaska Airlines, with a score of 765. For discount airlines, however, the leader was Southwest, with a score of 809—which certainly says something about how much fliers value cost in their satisfaction assessments.
Cost is also something that may have factored strongly into why Air Canada, and its fellow Canadian airline WestJet, fared so poorly among respondents. J.D. Power representative Michael Taylor believes that Canadian airlines suffer from a public perception that they are expensive, despite the fact that it is largely unfounded as a claim. He did note, however, that they tend to score better in the frills and entertainment categories, with lots of in-flight snacks and personal entertainment options to engage customers.