April 7, 2008 - Delta needs to get its act together, before it's too late

Tim Darnell

April 7, 2008

OK, so I've caught a little bit of heat lately for referring to Delta Air Lines as a "laughingstock" a few weeks ago on a Friday BTB Report .

The company isn't a laughingstock (as I was forcefully reminded). It's a corporation - my words, here - that went through a tough bankruptcy, thanks to some ill-conceived (and downright bad) decisions made by its leadership team (some of whom had no business running an airline), but successfully emerged from its own corporately created financial hell as a respected organization. Fair enough.

But today's news that baggage handling put AirTran Airways in the top spot of the 18th annual national Airline Quality Ratings study, while Delta leaders make their umpteenth trip back to the bargaining table with Northwest, is causing me to seriously wonder if Richard Anderson and team have their heads in the right place.

Delta already has decided to charge a certain fee to travelers - that would be, their customers – for extra baggage. Now, AirTran ranks No. 1 in today's survey because of its baggage handling. Meanwhile, Delta seems bound and determined to merge with someone (anyone!), less than a year after Richard Anderson assumed Delta's helm with assurances that a merger wasn't even on his radar.

My point during our podcast a few weeks ago was this: the whole merger business has been off and on for so long, that Delta is in serious jeopardy of not being taken seriously anymore by Wall Street. After surprisingly being named CEO (he wasn't one of Gerald Grinstein's choices, and Grinstein was Delta's man of the century at the time) one of Anderson's first statements was, we're not considering a merger. Well, it turned out that he was, and now, as Delta's approval ratings within its own industry plummet, he and his team are still seemingly bound and determined to find some airline with which to meld.

Seems like the only positive press the airline has received lately came from its new in-flight safety video, featuring a stewardess who was promptly christened "Deltalina" by fawning fans over the Internet.

Anderson and his company need to turn their attention to more important matters, such as customer satisfaction and quality rankings, before its once again, too late.