She told them. She told them about the complaint file, all of it, the cardiologist from Philadelphia and the honeymoon couple and the man in the wheelchair and the young woman who had been told to put her bag in the back with the others. She told them about the Sovereign tier, which she had created, and about the ninety thousand dollars, and about the inflight evaluation system that tied crew bonuses partly to Sovereign satisfaction scores, which had been her idea too. She told them about the Sovereign passenger who had put his hand on a junior flight attendant two years earlier, and about the email from customer relations asking the purser to make his next experience exceptional. She told them about the check-in attendant who had redirected her to economy before asking her name. She told them about Graham, nineteen years, eleven commendation letters, standing in the aisle with his tablet clutched to his chest, saying just for today.
"None of these people are bad at their jobs," she said. "They're good at their jobs. They're doing exactly what we've trained them, rewarded them, and evaluated them to do. We built a system that tells our crews that some passengers matter more than others. We didn't write it down. We'd never have written it down. But we built it into the bonuses and the training and the escalation policies and the way we handle complaints, and they learned it, because they're smart and they pay attention. And the passengers learned it too. Mrs. Ashworth learned it. She learned that if she wanted a seat that wasn't hers, all she had to do was ask, and somebody would be moved. She learned it from us."
She paused.
"The vote today is whether to put the Signature product on four more routes. Eleven more aircraft. A little under two hundred million dollars. I proposed it. I still believe in it. But I'm not going to ask you to vote for it until we've fixed what's broken in the product we already have." She turned a page in the folder in front of her. "So here's what I'm proposing instead."
She laid it out. It took twenty minutes. A rewrite of the premium cabin service standards, so that seat assignments were enforced by the crew without exception and any passenger who refused an assigned seat was referred to the captain, every time. A new section in the conditions of carriage, explicit and unambiguous, stating that harassment or demeaning treatment of other passengers or crew on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or disability was grounds for removal and for suspension of loyalty status at any tier. A complete overhaul of the crew evaluation system, so that no part of any crew member's bonus would depend on the satisfaction scores of any one tier of passenger. A new reporting line for crew who experienced or witnessed harassment by passengers, going directly to an independent office that reported to the board, not to customer relations. A review, going back three years, of every crew complaint about Sovereign passengers that had been closed without action. And a training program for every premium cabin crew member and every premium check-in agent in the network, written not by consultants but by working crew, starting with a purser named Graham Ellery and a flight attendant named Tessa Lindqvist, and taught in part by people who had been on the other side of it.
"I've spoken to Captain Whitaker," she said. "He's agreed to help with the section on the captain's authority. I've spoken to a man named Andre Battle, who was in 1F, and who coaches youth soccer in Newark, and who has been asked if he's in the right seat on airplanes more times than he can count. He's agreed to help too. He says he's very good at talking to people who don't want to listen."
There was a faint ripple of laughter around the table. It died quickly.
"The cost," Naomi said, "is about eleven million dollars in the first year, mostly in training and lost crew time. There will also be a cost in Sovereign revenue. Some of our most valuable customers are going to find that they're no longer able to do things they've been doing for years, and some of them won't like it, and some of them will leave. I've asked Peter's team to model it. Their best estimate is that we lose somewhere between three and seven percent of Sovereign revenue in the first eighteen months." She closed the folder. "I think it's worth it. I think it's worth it morally, and I think it's worth it commercially, because I think there are a great many people out there who would fly with us if they believed they'd be treated the same as everyone else in that cabin. People who look at our premium product now and decide, in about a second, that it isn't for them. I'd like to give them a reason to decide differently. I'd like the vote today to be on this. And I'd like the expansion vote moved to the next meeting, once we've begun."
She sat down.
For a long moment nobody said anything.
Then Harold Kessler leaned forward.