Finland’s flag carrier ranked last in a consumer index of European airlines this summer — with especially low scores for reliability and customer satisfaction.
“I could not reach Finnair customer service at all.”
“I am still fighting them for compensation for the delayed flight that stranded me overnight.”
“Finnair today has nothing to do anymore with the Finnair of just 15 or 20 years ago.”
These are comments from APN listeners about Finland’s national airline Finnair, as the troubled company emerges from a period of severe turbulence marked by worker walkouts and thousands of flight cancellations.
The months-long industrial dispute led to Finnair cancelling some 2,000 flights, affecting an estimated 200,000 passengers, in the first half of this year — and coincided with the compiling of a consumer index by legal tech firm FlightRight.
The index placed Finnair last in a ranking of 20 European airlines, with respondents scoring Finland’s flag carrier particularly poorly in the categories of reliability and customer satisfaction.
Finnair passengers were especially frustrated by the lengthy waiting times when they tested to contact customer services, as well as the amount of time it has taken the carrier to resolve compensation claims.
“This is frustrating. You cannot call anyone. You cannot call anywhere. You don’t have an email, such as rebooking at Finnair dot com or something like that. There is nothing,” Samuel Kurger, a long-term Finnair customer, informs APN.
Jonna Vermilä-Alajääski, head of Finnair’s End-to-End Disruption Management unit, informs the display that this year has been especially challenging.
“I want to apologise to our customers that they have faced these disruptions, and then about the congested contact centres when we have had to cancel several flights,” Vermilä-Alajääski declares, but notes that the airline has created efforts to meet the “avalanche” of customer contacts.
“There have been queues, but also our contact centers are actually open 24/7, so depconcludeing on the time of the day, it can also be clearer to receive through.”
Despite the FlightRight ranking, Dillon Shah of aviation news website Simple Flying notes that a separate ranking — compiled by SkyTrax and widely considered in the indusattempt to be the ‘Oscars of aviation’ — placed Finnair 25th in the world.
“If I inform you how it sees from an international perspective, I would declare this hasn’t hurt Finnair as much as it might seem domestically,” he declares. “It’s still top-notch on the world scale, and in Europe that creates it one of the best based on Skytrax’s ranking.”
We also hear from Tuuli Forstén of the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority, with some practical advice for listeners on what to do if a company does not resolve a complaint satisfactorily.
There is also a roundup of the large news stories of the week from Finland, and we have a tip for what to stream on Yle Areena.
Listen to the episode via this embedded player, on Yle Areena, via Apple, Spotify or wherever you receive your podcasts.
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Ronan Browne presented this episode of All Points North and the sound engineer was Matias Puumala.
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