As a ground handling agent, my job duties revolved around the operations in the boarding gate hold room. Our main goal is to ensure swift turnaround of the arrival flight and departure as scheduled with the cooperation of all the departing passengers. In recent years, Singapore’s Changi Airport has adopted a ‘quiet’ airport style whereby they would no longer do a ‘Last Call’ paging for passengers that have not boarded the flight. Often, passengers who missed their flights would blame the lack of broadcast.
I remember this incident very vividly as other than what I mentioned earlier happened; there was more to the story. That day I received an ad hoc job duty to escort a passenger out of the airside of the airport. This passenger was a business class passenger who had missed his flight. When I approached him, he was exasperated regarding the treatment by the gate staff. He claimed to be chased away from the gate and that the aircraft left without him with 30 minutes away from the scheduled time of departure. While escorting him, he reiterated how he would not have received that rude treatment by Singapore Airlines (SQ) because of his membership tier and how ridiculous it was for the aircraft to depart so early. Initially, I wanted to retort him with facts and be defensive regarding the attitude of my colleague, but I feared it would only escalate the matter.
During this whole ordeal, I understood that for a frequent flyer like him, he would have known the appropriate timing to be at the gate. However, that instance, he remembered the flight timing wrongly, but through my analysis, the cause of the fuss should be how my colleague had communicated with him concerning him missing the flight and what he should do next.
Q: If you were to be the one facing an angry passenger that was in the wrong, what would you do?
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