I just got off the phone with Ben Baldanza from Spirit Airlines regarding a series of posts I wrote about 2 years ago now. Long enough ago that I honestly didn't immediately recognize the name, and once I did, completely thought it was Gavin putting someone up to it. Mr. Baldanza very kindly sent me an e-mail from his corporate e-mail address to confirm that it was indeed him ;). Gotta love the Internet.

The conversation was brief, but Mr. Baldanza informed me of the various steps his company has taken to improve their customer service situation and all the factors involved in the company during that particular time frame. The way I understand it is that they had some issues with a third party service provider at that time, the provider was replaced and subsequently their various consumer agency ratings started to improve.

Mr. Baldanza also outlined the steps they took in order to resolve (within reason) the customer complaint that ended in the accidental "Reply-to-All" e-mail. While the comment made in that e-mail came across as unbecoming to many of us, it's clear that some lessons were learned by the accident, and as usual, there are two sides to every story. I was also informed that they've had some employee turnover at their company. I can only hope that the spokesman who told the Chicago Tribune I made the whole thing up is now waiting in a breadline somewhere.

I kid.

But in all seriousness, I think it's fair to go ahead and shut this multi-year spat down. It started with me being upset that I couldn't get a $5 refund on my checked bag from a missed flight to Vegas, and clearly, the series turned into much more than that. In an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, I told them that what I really wanted was for Spirit to start taking care of their customer service issues. The steps the company has taken in changing providers, and as further evidenced by Mr. Baldanza's personal phone call, show me that they have indeed taken it seriously. Pretty sure we can call things square now ;)

Thanks for the call, Ben.

UPDATE 11/11/2009:

The Orlando Sentinel covered this, and Heather Harvey, Spirit's Manager of Consumer Relations left a comment. She mentions her e-mail address if anyone has any further complaints or wants to pass along a note.

Heather, I hope you don't mind me reposting your comment over here!

What a great article! I am so pleased with the positive feedback – we are making strides to correct our mistakes. It's true that I am biased since I work for Spirit, but I fly us more than almost anyone and I expect great service just like any other customer. If you didn't receive the service you expected please email me the details, Heather.Harvey@spiritair.com (now you have the contact information to give to those upset customers that call you Etan). We can use your feedback for training purposes and to explain to you perhaps why things worked out the way they did. We can't make it right if you don't let us know where we messed up! Give us the opportunity to correct our mistakes and I assure you that you won't regret it :)

Respectfully,

Heather Harvey
Manager Consumer Relations
Spirit Airlines

Lots of chatter about the insurance industry report claiming that the Baucus health care proposal will raise premiums 111% over the next ten years. Obviously, any report commissioned by special interest should be questioned. It's just worth pointing out that the special interest group in this particular case are the folks who will be setting the premiums to begin with. Yikes.

The logic put forth is that there is not enough incentive to force people to maintain coverage (low fines), and since insurance companies won't be allowed to turn away those already sick, the incentive is to now pay the fine instead of the insurance premium. Simply go out and get coverage whenever you get sick and save a boat load of cash. The reduction in revenue gets passed down to the consumer in order to make up the difference, hence the increases.

Supporters of the health care bill argue that the report can't be trusted because insurance companies stand to make less money if the bill goes through. While true, that's entirely the point. The report basically says what insurance companies are going to do in response to making less money. Remember, again, they set the premiums.

Regardless, of all the various proposals the Baucus bill does seem to be the only one that's even remotely considerable (I'm being kind... I'm more of a shopping mall guy.) There's no public option and from a budget perspective it's also more financially sound (according to the CBO, though the director is on record saying they did not have adequate time to fully work out the Net). Unfortunately, it also has no chance in hell of being what actually gets passed. And I think it goes without saying that something is going to get passed.

Anyone want to take bets on just how much of a train-wreck the bill that comes out of conference committee is going to be? ;)

http://www.SaveSpace.US is a movement started by people on the Space Coast to raise the awareness of the nation, the President, and other elected officials: Space needs to be a priority for America!

Our country's space program faces a very real and very urgent threat. With all the talk about stimulus, both in job creation/retention and in research & development, it's worth pointing out that NASA positively contributes to both. NASA is responsibile for much of what we take for granted on a daily basis. GPS, quartz watches, wifi, reflective insulation, solar water heaters, coolers, cordless power tools, flat screen tv's, freeze dried foods, early warning weather systems -- the list goes on and on. It's not just a government agency, it's an agency that helps fuel research and development that leds to new industries and businesses in the private sector.

There are two very important Call-to-Action's on this, do both before October 31st, 2009

1) Send a letter. If you're absolute against physical letters, send an e-mail. Whatever you do, speak up.
2) Tell people. Send an email to friends with the web url (http://www.savespace.us) and let them know the urgency & importance of getting involved. Join the facebook group and suggest to your facebook friends that they do the same. Follow the effort on Twitter. Retweet things. Spread the word.

Think of the various world governments like retail. There's Neiman Marcus on one end and Walmart on the other. As much as we all love to hate on Walmart (pre-recession), many folks basically argue that we are to be the Walmart of governments. We, as evidenced by our business plan (the constitution) are to be a low cost, low overhead, highly efficient superstore. Others will argue that we need to be a high end department store going forward in order to better compete. And then there are others still that argue that we are to be neither. We are more like the Sunday morning farmers market or even the high end shopping mall -- whatever it is, we simply provide the space and various vendors show up and then sort themselves out. .

That's basically the health care debate. It's not about helping anyone or about something as seemingly straight forward as reform. Whether you believe it or not, all sides want to make life better and see our standard of living rise. That's the goal that binds us as a country. The discussion is about the business plan and asking ourselves whether or not we have the means of executing it.

You can layer on all sorts of arguments about efficiency and costs on top, but essentially the great debate is over what the business of our government will be going forward. It's safe to say that our founders were far less interested in building the world's best shopping experience and far more interested in letting us build and maintain our own shops, as individuals acting independently and freely without limitation to our imagination or our ingenuity. Creating a government backed entity that is immune from going broke essentially dismantles, or seriously impedes, the ability for individuals to pursue whatever industry that entity resides in. It, by mere definition, limits choice and reduces the concept our founders had of "liberty."

From my center-right perspective, it would seem to me that instead of trying to answer a question that has been asked for hundreds of years, we should try to fix the public options we already have before we consider scaling them, or rather, creating something completely new altogether (like a public version of the worst piece of the puzzle, insurance).

• Fix the VA and Medicare first.
• Enact tort reform to reduce liability inflation.
• Allow insurance companies to compete across state lines.
• Force everyone in the process to fully disclose costs to the patient up front and on an ongoing basis, instead of simply surprising them with the bill at the end of the visit (and make sure the patient has at least some sort of skin in the game so they'll actually care, provided they have means -- remember, the poor in this country don't pay for hospital visits as it stands).
• Give tax deductions for preventative care.
• Increase health education in our schools and provide easy access to information for adults.

I mean, the list of relatively non-controversial reform methods goes on and on. That is, until politics and media get in the way. Bleh.

Anyway.. I'm off Rep. Posey's health care town hall tonight. 6:30, King Center. Should be an absolute zoo.

We've covered a ton of ground this summer over on Emurse.com.

Andy Fraley joined the team as our lead designer / front end guru, then Chris Finke came on board to lead up development efforts. Both of these guys are two of the most talented people I've ever had the pleasure of working with, so I'm incredibly excited and proud to have them at AOL and on board. We've also gained a valuable team member in Gautham from the AOL BDC office, and we're thrilled to have him involved and on the team.

We launched a complete redesign of the UI this summer and have a bunch of new tweaks coming to back it all up. The first phase of the design efforts were the external pages, the second phase will be all the "internal" stuff -- the resume builder, distribution tracker, website tab and a whole host of new features.

Stay tuned.

Andy Fraley was hired as our lead UI designer. I'm extremely excited to be working with Andy again. We both worked on the Netscape.com re-launch a few years back and I've enjoyed following his career ever since. He's a very talented designer and we're extremely fortunate to have him on board.

We've hired a handful of bloggers to help re-kindle the Emurse.com Blog. Lots of great content coming online over there, expect some very big changes once we build up some more fresh resources.

Here's a sampling of some of the latest blog posts:

Top 5 Tools for Successful Telecommuting
Top 10 Highest Starting Salaries
The Benefits of Working with a Recruiter
How to Work with a Recruiter
Resume Rescue: Achievements, not Responsibilities
Top 21 Part Time Jobs

So Gavin actually wrote this a while ago now, but it's just been sitting to the side collecting enough data to be interesting.

We're now ranking people based on hash tag usage/associations. It's a little less straight forward than the other rankings (some secret sauce involved), but it's produced some interesting lists.

Top 100 'Celebrity' on Twitter
Top 100 'Politics' on Twitter
Top 100 'TCOT' on Twitter
Top 100 'FixReplies' on Twitter ;)

You get the idea. Basically, append /tag/<tag>/ to whatever you're looking at.

Enjoy, and everyone thank Gavin for being clever.

Article about Twitterholic.com

Probably a good thing they went with a more natural photo than the posed ones they took. Not sure specifically what we're laughing about, but mainly the 'shoot' consisted of Gavin and I repeatedly asking things along the lines of "Are you sure we're not supposed to take our shirts off?"

Good times, good times.

Kathryn and I were very fortunate to be guests of our congressman to the STS-125 launch.

Took these with my d80 from the OSB2 observation deck :)


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