The waiting time to talk to a person on Frontier Airlines' customer service line has now been extended to forever. The budget carrier says the transition to offering online, mobile, and text support only was completed last weekend, CNBC reports. Callers to the customer service line now get the message: "At Frontier, we offer the lowest fares in the industry by operating our airline as efficiently as possible. We want our customers to be able to operate efficiently as well, which is why we make it easy to find what you need at Flyfrontier.com or on our mobile app." Callers are not offered the option of speaking to an agent, Travel Noire notes.
An airline spokesperson says the switch will ensure passengers will "get the information they need as expeditiously and efficiently as possible." Frontier exec Jack Filine told investors earlier this month that the change would lower labor costs. He said agents on phone calls were limited to one-on-one interactions, while a chat agent could handle three or more inquiries at once. "Think about the most sort of obscure question a customer might ask that would take a call center agent many, many minutes to research and find an answer to," he said, per CNBC. "The chatbot can answer that very quickly."
After cutting staff during the pandemic, airlines had a lot of trouble finding talented staff willing to work for low wages when travel picked up again, the the New York Times reported in a look at long customer service waits last year. Dean Headley, co-author of Airline Quality Rating, said he didn't expect airlines to fix call wait times anytime soon. "They are trying to work with technology instead of staffing up with people that can answer the damn phone," he said, adding that airlines "believe there is always another person who will buy that ticket and that's probably not altogether incorrect." (More Frontier Airlines stories.)
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