Flight ratings - whats the big deal?

Booking an early morning flight, for business, is always a tricky thing. Depending on your meeting start time (say 10 AM), you'd have to allow room for some buffer beyond the budgeted time, for landing at the airport and taking a taxi to the meeting location. You'd definitely need to allow atleast 45 to 60 minutes buffer time for any delays. 

But what if your flight gets delayed by upto an hour? All your pre-planning and scheduling goes right out of the window. So, thats some more slack time needed. However, the frustrating thing for me is that all this buffer cuts down on 'precious' early morning sleep time. Proper sleep on the day of travel is anyway a rare commodity, since I've found that you need to be up by 4 AM for a 7 AM flight. 

Same is the case with the night return flights. You budget time to get back home at an 'earthly' hour, say by 11 PM. Flight schedule changes and airport traffic congestion easily add up another 60 to 90 minutes.

This brings me to the question. Why don't travel sites show ratings of a flight's past performance? Is it usually on time? How is the service? How is the food quality? This can easily be aggregated from customers, post the travel. Since delays could also be due to airport traffic congestion or other reasons beyond a carrier's control, the feedback on timeliness could be on whether the boarding happened on time.

I'm surprised that none of the airline travel webistes do this today. This is a tried and tested feedback loop in other industries - think cab aggregators like Uber/Ola, hotel booking aggregators like Tripadvisor. In the travel segment, by aggregators like redbus (sample given here). The closest site I could find was flightstats, which is a dedicated website on past flight statistics and has other means of data collection since it doesn't have a customer feedback loop to leverage (see image below).

Simple bus ratings from redbus.in	FlightStats rating summary

When an online purchase goes wrong

After years of buying stuff online, I recently had my first dud transaction. I had ordered Amish Tripathi's "Scions of Ishvaku" and two other books on Amazon, about a month back. The order was to be serviced by three different sellers. I promptly got a confirmation and delivery of the 2 other books, however 'Scions of Ishkavu' order status progressed through various stages from 'being dispatched', 'reaching warehouse' and even 'out for delivery', but there was no physical trace of the order.

When I called up customer service after a few days, the service agent was extremely courteous, reassuring and promised to check with the courier company. But again, nothing happened, not even an acknowledgement of the service request. I eventually ended up talking to the service desk 4 times, and surprisingly every conversation was alike - very courteous, understanding, reassuring and with absolutely no action. In the final call when I persisted and threatened legal action, things finally moved. I got a complaint lodged as well, against the agents who had (mis)handled the case earlier.

This was a low value transaction with no urgency, yet it finally got onto my nerves. The large e-commerce players have many a chink in their armor, inspite of increasing maturity in their processes and million of dollars of investment into customer service and delivery. Once in a while, you do keep hearing of issues from friends about incorrect billing, order not getting delivered or even worse, getting a lemon when you order high-value electronic items. However, online is the way forward for consumers and e-commerce companies should speedily fix those odd issues in their workflows.

PS: Yesterday, I got an email from the bank confirming that a refund has been my initiated on this transaction. But, the surprise this time was that the credit had been done for all 3 books, not just the one undelivered. I'm just getting a request raised for payment of the 2 other books, and I wonder how much time Amazon would take for this credit back to them!