Vanessa Fox. Nude.

After traveling practically non-stop for six months, I took a break from from the ziplock bags and the public partial stripping and the coffee roulette (will it all be decaf once again?) and went on a road trip for a couple of weeks instead. I’ve since made up for it though. I’ve visited the lovely airports of Long Beach, Seattle, Chicago, JFK, Newark, San Jose, Orange County, and LAX since then.

During my flying hiatus, Natala and I went to the Alaska MVP Gold lunch. Yes, we have been mocked ever since. But yes, we had a very good time and will go the next one too. If they invite us back. We may have been just a wee bit vocal, what with the whole experience of being denied boarding of our plane and ending up on stand by for an entirely different airport and finally getting on that stand by flight, albeit in middle seats. With my cats. It sucks to be stuck in an airport with cats. You really want to get them to their destination as quickly as possible. You know my cats are the picture of perfection and goodness though, so of course, they made it through just fine. We found at at the lunch that we were caught up in a test that went a bit awry in that the ticket counter agent wasn’t testing as much as implementing. We forgave them in the end. So did the cats.

It only made sense that we went to the lunch and told Alaska about all the stuff that we liked and didn’t, since we tell our friends often enough. And it turns out our friends don’t actually care about that stuff as much as you might think. Crazy! Fortunately, at Gnomedex, we met someone who is as Alaska-obsessed as we are and in fact was at the same lunch! Which means we aren’t the only geeky fliers. OK, so maybe it’s just the three of us.

The lunch was a good example of how to keep your best customers coming back. Even if they don’t always have perfect experiences, giving them a forum to talk about that, acknowledging your missteps, sharing plans to fix them, and asking for feedback all help keep recurring customers recurring.

It’s lesson that anyone with customers of any kind can take from our geeky lunch. Don’t pretend you’re perfect if you’re not. Your customers aren’t dumb. Ignoring mistakes just makes it seem like you are either clueless or don’t plan to do anything to make things better and hope problems just goes away on their own. Of course, gathering up your best customers and reminding them of what you’ve done right and are planning for the future isn’t a bad plan either.

If you can’t meet with your customers in person, you can still keep them posted and get feedback. A blog is great to keep everyone informed, and comments or a discussion forum lets customers stay involved. Alaska had employees from just about every department from the lunch, so if anyone had a question about anything, someone was there to answer it. You should do the same with your blog and forums. Get employees from across the company involved.

So what about those delays in getting bags? They’ve reduced the time, but agree it’s still crappy and are working on it. Of course, my method of dealing with this is not to check bags. And if I absolutely have to, I follow Natala’s brilliant tip. Just go hang out in the board room for 20 minutes or so. They’ve got wireless, wine, snacks… It’s a much better place to wait than baggage claim.

Delays at Long Beach? Often because they don’t store parts for the 737s there. Who knew? If you went to the lunch, you would!

I also recently learned the value in writing down where I park in the airport garage. As it turns out, walking down aisle after aisle isn’t as exciting as you might imagine.

So share information about both your successes and your mistakes. Ask your customers for their feedback. And listen. Hey, it’s like getting free consulting from those who know your customers better than anyone.