Ex cabin crew in airline customer relations and complaints: the desk job that uses every layover story, how to get in and what it pays

Ex BA, nine years, Cape Town now, and before recruitment I spent two years in airline customer relations, the department that answers the complaints, and it is the ex crew job nobody mentions because it sounds boring. It is not. Here it is.

What the department does

Answers the complaints, the compensation claims, the lost baggage escalations, the disruption claims under the passenger rights regulations, the letters from the passenger in 22C who did not get the chicken. In writing, on the phone, and increasingly on social media. It decides what the airline pays, apologises for, and defends. It is the airline's memory of every bad flight.

Why ex crew are good at it

Because we know what actually happened. A complaint about a rude crew member reads differently to someone who has been the crew member at hour eleven of a sector. A claim about a delay reads differently to someone who has sat on the aircraft during it. Ex crew can tell the genuine complaint from the professional complainer in two sentences, and the department knows it. Half my colleagues were ex crew.

How I got in

An internal application while still flying, when the department advertised. An interview that was about writing (a sample response to a complaint, which I wrote in the voice of the purser I wished had answered mine), about the regulations (EU261 and the equivalents, which I had to learn), and about temperament (the person who takes the complaints personally does not last). A short training on the systems. Then a desk.

What it pays

An office salary at the airline's grade for the role, which for me was a little below my crew total with allowances and a little above the basic. Stable, monthly, pensionable, with the staff travel kept, which is the thing that makes the airline's desk jobs worth more than an outside company's.

What the job is like

A queue of cases, a target for responses, a set of rules for what can be offered, and a lot of writing. The good days are the ones where you fix something real for someone who was genuinely let down. The bad days are the professional complainers and the lawyers. The skill is writing an apology that is honest, does not admit what it should not, and ends the conversation kindly. Crew who were good with the difficult passenger are good at this.

Where it leads

Customer experience management, the operations control side (where the ex crew who understand disruption go), recruitment (where I went), training, and the management grades. Customer relations is a door into the airline's office, and the office is where the second career happens.

For crew thinking about it

Watch for the internal postings. Learn the passenger rights regulation for your region before the interview. Write a sample response and have a friend who is not crew read it. And go in knowing it is a desk, with all that means, and a desk that uses every year you flew.