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Home » United Airlines » United Airlines’ Controversial Flight Attendant Promoter Score (FPS)
United Airlines

United Airlines’ Controversial Flight Attendant Promoter Score (FPS)

Matthew Klint Posted onAugust 1, 2022November 13, 2023 16 Comments

a woman in flight attendant giving a piece of paper to a woman in an airplane

Flight attendants at United Airlines remain unhappy with long hold times to reach the crew scheduling desk and have devised a controversial new Flight Attendant Promoter Score (FPS) scheme as a way to hold management accountable.

New Flight Attendant Promoter Score At United Airlines

Last month, I wrote about the problem of long hold times to reach the crew scheduling desk, which has boiled over in a public spat between the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) union and United management.


> Read More: Union Responds To Harsh Memo From United Airlines To Flight Attendants


The AFA has come up with a quirky new system in which flight attendants will rate management each week, using a new tool it hopes will hold United accountable in addressing flight attendant concerns.

United heavily relies upon a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to track customer feedback…we’ve detailed that here. In the same vein, the Flight Attendant Promoter Score will be determined by asking flight attendants to offer feedback on numerical basis on a number of issues. Those include:

  1. I feel my contributions to our airline are valued
  2. I am able to trade my pairings/reserve days with open time/pool
  3. I feel supported by management
  4. My contact with crew scheduling is timely and my issues are resolved
  5. Management is responsive to my needs during irregular operations

Each week, flight attendants are invited to assess those five statements on a scale from 1-10.

Flight Attendants who rate 9-10 are seen as promoters, those who rate 7-8 are seen as neutral or passive, and those who rate 0-6 are seen as detractors.

(this seems heavily-stacked toward “detractors” but is generally the way NPS works)

The AFA says this metric “will give a strong visual indicator on where management has improved or what areas they need to continue work on.” Taking it seriously, claims the AFA, will lead to more customer satisfaction, since happy flight attendants will be better able to meet passenger needs:

United Inflight management has an invaluable tool to gauge the satisfaction of flight attendant’s in the workplace through FPS. Being responsive to flight attendant feedback will make a significant impact on our work environment and should have a correlating impact on United’s NPS scores.

It is not clear if the AFA will make the weekly results public.

CONCLUSION

The AFA is asking flight attendants to take part in a new Flight Attendant Promoter Score initiative, that it hopes will move management to more expeditiously address workplace concerns. United has not commented on the FPS scheme, but this move once again ratchets up the divide between the AFA and the company.

image: United Airlines

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About Author

Matthew Klint

Matthew is an avid traveler who calls Los Angeles home. Each year he travels more than 200,000 miles by air and has visited more than 135 countries. Working both in the aviation industry and as a travel consultant, Matthew has been featured in major media outlets around the world and uses his Live and Let's Fly blog to share the latest news in the airline industry, commentary on frequent flyer programs, and detailed reports of his worldwide travel.

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16 Comments

  1. GS Guy Reply
    August 1, 2022 at 2:05 pm

    Yeah. How about we customers get to rate flight attendants? Maybe they could make bonuses and continued employment based on it…..

    • Batchcaloupe Reply
      August 1, 2022 at 2:49 pm

      But you can and you do!! Don’t you think one aspect of these scores is about the flight attendants??

    • Mr. Marcus Reply
      August 1, 2022 at 3:46 pm

      UA has been surveying passengers about FA performance for a while (couple of years at least I suspect).

      I don’t know how that information is used in terms of comp and retention, but I will assume that it likely factors in.

      • Malik on Wall Street Reply
        August 1, 2022 at 7:21 pm

        Did they implement this before or after they beat up Dr. David Dao?

        • Mary Reply
          August 1, 2022 at 7:41 pm

          You do know that it was the airport security who used force to remove Dao not any of UA employees?

  2. Batchcaloupe Reply
    August 1, 2022 at 3:19 pm

    What’s good for the goose……

    You going to do something on the pilots deal how they suspended the voting because both sides thought it would get voted down??

  3. Christian Reply
    August 1, 2022 at 5:35 pm

    So, the idea is to rate management but not in any fashion that actually helps the customer? This is a petulant publicity stunt. My expectations of United’s unions are pretty low but this idea is a real stinker.

  4. Koggerj Reply
    August 1, 2022 at 8:16 pm

    Sara Nelson is already getting her broom ready.

  5. Anon Reply
    August 1, 2022 at 10:28 pm

    Thanks for posting about this!
    -An anonymous flight attendant 🙂

  6. DavidGC Reply
    August 2, 2022 at 4:25 am

    I’m genuinely confused about something here.
    I thought the essential meaning of a “promoter score” was to gauge whether the respondent would promote/refer the company to others. Am I wrong about that? None of the questions ask the FA if they would recommend a friend to fly with United.

    Since this is polling employees and not customers, maybe it would be more useful to ask FAs if they would recommend United to others as a good place to work, but none of the questions do that either. So I’m confused why they are calling this a promoter score.

  7. Goforride Reply
    August 2, 2022 at 1:27 pm

    I don’t know who writes this stuff, but “holding accountable” is now on the required use list of leftie words.

    Management isn’t “accountable” to anyone except the stockholders by way of the board of directors.

    Employees who participate in this stuff on company time and on company property should be subject to discipline for violating one of the most fundamental principles of business organization, the necessity to maintain good order and discipline.

    And this principle is laid out explicitly in company regulations.

    • Erik Stark Reply
      August 5, 2022 at 1:01 pm

      Utterly clueless. First, managements who think they are only accountable to the shareholders generally run the worst companies in the world, particularly for employees and customers. But what a typically conservative trope. In fact, the best companies, make clear that taking care of employees and customers is actually their first priority for the simple reason that it usually leads to a better bottom line. Second, in a customer service oriented business, employee morale determines your customer experience. You can treat employees as robots if you want, and just be accountable to the shareholders, but you will have terrible service. You can’t treat your employees like crap and then say “..now don’t forget to smile at the customers and treat them way better than we’re treating you!” Third, the idiotic notion that managements aren’t accountable to the public at all times is conservatism at its finest. So if cuts in maintenance or training lead to accidents and loss of life, managements malfeasance and hyper focus on cutting costs at all costs should be forgiven because it temporarily made the stock price go up. If a company dumps toxins into the environment affecting the health of millions, it’s okay because they are only accountable to the shareholders, and they liked the fact it increased the bottom line and shareholder value by not having to be responsible for the pollution they emitted. Etc., etc., times a million examples. I’m always curious how brains like yours work. It seems to be locked in a tight box looking out a small window and thinks that’s all there is to the world. Unfortunately, many people with that affliction are running the world so it probably seems perfectly normal to you and the way things should go. But as I stated at the beginning, it’s utterly clueless.

  8. Jerry Reply
    August 2, 2022 at 2:19 pm

    Nobody has got in with a “why didn’t they call it FAPS?” joke yet? C’mon… You guys are all a bunch of nerds!

  9. Anonymous Reply
    August 2, 2022 at 4:12 pm

    United has been abusing flights attendants since we came back from the pandemic furlough. They are sending us in 3 to 4 leg trips with 13 to 14 hour duty days with minimum rest and them back out to do the same the next day. We spend countless hours on the phone with crew scheduling and don’t have hotels for our layover destinations While being on the phone waiting for scheduling to answer is cutting into the little rest time that we have. We have ZERO trading flexibility which makes its difficult to keep Dr appointments etc. , which causes us to call out of work. Overall the morale of the work place is low. Many flight attendants have hung up there wings due to mental health and exhaustion. We are in contract negotiations and seems our union is not doing a great job to support us. A survey isn’t going to help, seems it’s just a bandaid. Yet we still have to pay back Union dues from furlough even though the union did nothing for the 5500 flight attendants that were out of work for 9 months last year. .. such a joke they are

    • Christian Rogner Reply
      August 2, 2022 at 8:47 pm

      Just curious…. Are the FA’s receiving back pay? If not the union can go to hell!!

      • Anonymous Reply
        August 3, 2022 at 4:54 pm

        The FA’S did receive their back pay from furlough. The union is also collecting their back union dues from furloughed flight attendants even though they weren’t active.

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