User hostile design from airlines

Never connect your FlyingBlue frequent flier account to your Air France account

I hate being a person who complains about a bad customer experience, but this frequent flier design loop from hell, courtesy of Air France and Delta is worth documenting.

As someone who spends a lot of time talking about the ways that user interfaces get grafted onto analog experiences to make them terrible, the experience of having miles credited to account due to bad design was worth documenting.

For context, FlyingBlue is the frequent flier program from KLM & Air France. As part of the SkyTeam alliance, Delta passengers who enroll in the Skymiles program can request to have their KLM or Air France flights credited to their Skymiles account either before or after their flight.

However, this only works if you do not also create a FlyingBlue account. You have to notice this when you first create an account on Air France’s site not to tie your new account to FlyingBlue.

Otherwise, your miles will always default to FlyingBlue even if you change it in your settings, because of a bug that’s existed for at least seven years that doesn’t let users delete FlyingBlue from their bookings.

You might be thinking, “This is a lot of effort to document what is clearly user error.” You’d be wrong. This legacy issue has been outlined on forums across the internet dating back as early as 2014.

If you call Flying Blue on the phone, a voice prompt will direct you to their website and hang up on you. There is no way to reach a representative. The website email form is not easily accessible, as the categories listed will try to get you to login and not to send your email to anyone.

Emailing Flying Blue will eventually yield a reply in the form of them cancelling your account, but only if you write a letter and sign the letter and attach it to the inquiry form on the Flying Blue site.

If you do manage to access the Air France claims page to leave a comment, you’ll need to login with your confirmation code before you’ll see a screen that lets you comment. If you want to cancel your Flying Blue account, you’ll need to send a typed letter and sign it before it’ll be acknowledged. Don’t be surprised if no one replies to this email.

Delta isn’t any more helpful. Do not submit a request on Delta’s site for missing miles for this ticket, because you’ll be told it was already credited elsewhere. In the off-chance you can get a human to speak with you — unlikely — they’ll tell you that Air France and Flying Blue have to submit the miles to them, that they can’t do it themselves.

I’ve seen reports online that this was easier at a different point, but in the era of COVID and airlines understaffed, you’re going to struggle to get someone to take your request seriously.

I’ve used the messaging systems, but those are negative feedback loops as well. Someone will reply to you — usually within 15 hours — with some kind of reply asking to investigate your request, but once you ask to 1) transfer to miles to Skymiles or 2) cancel your account, the replier does not reply anymore or tells you they can’t help. If it’s a Delta respondent, they’ll just send you back to Air France/Flying Blue, who if you recall above, do not have an actual line for you to call about this.

At the end of the day, this isn’t that important. But it’s an example of the hellscape that large companies use to thwart users. In the past, this process would’ve been manual and even if you were on the phone for a long time, you’d have escalation paths. Even if it resulted in a manager telling you there’s nothing they can do, at least there’s some kind of finality.

Instead, the current state tricks users into thinking there’s recourse, when there’s anything but.

The frustration has made me want to cancel my account with both companies — I’ve already canceled FlyingBlue — because this kind of user hostility is avoidable, but legacy companies don’t invest in UX.