ATLANTA—On a recent day here at Delta Air Lines Inc.'s headquarters, Chen Gang, a China Eastern Airlines Corp. executive, listened on a headset to Delta agents handling live passengers' complaints.
Mr. Chen, general manager of China Eastern's call center in Shanghai, oversees 1,200 employees, but they deal only with ticketing. Complaints about other issues go to various departments and some take a long time to resolve, he said.
A Delta supervisor explained how the Atlanta team strives to reach resolutions in 18 minutes on average on a full range of problems. "I see them writing letters," Mr. Chen said of some of the 65 Delta agents working in this call center. "They're not pushing the problem away. It's a lot different than in China."
Mr. Chen's visit was part of a corporate cultural-exchange program ultimately aimed at addressing a problem bedeviling airlines in both the U.S. and China: While air traffic between the countries is soaring, U.S. and Chinese carriers aren't getting nearly as much of the benefit as they think they should.
Between the U.S. and most nations of the world, carriers from both sides normally command at least 85% of the air traffic. But between the U.S. and China, the combined airlines are only getting about 60%, Delta estimates, putting about $250 million a year in industry revenue into the pockets of airline rivals, mostly in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan.
Delta wants to help its Chinese partners grab back some of that business by making their own hubs more efficient and attractive, and by more closely aligning their operations with Delta's so both sides can boost the number of passengers they share. "We need shorter connecting times, elite customer service, quality lounges and reliable transfers," said Charlie Pappas, Delta's vice president of alliances. "These have not yet been givens in China."
Delta, the third-largest U.S. airline, currently derives just 1.6% of its $33 billion in annual passenger revenue from China. But it has high hopes for the market, and last year carried about 1,200 passengers a day in each direction between the U.S. and China, up 55% since 2011, Delta said. Passengers flying between the U.S. and China hit 3.8 million in 2012, the latest year for which data are available, up from 2.6 million two years earlier, according to U.S. government figures.
The International Air Transport Association forecast that "routes within or connected to China" will be the largest driver of global growth from 2013 through 2017, accounting for 24% of new passengers, or about 227 million travelers.
Asian rivals operate big hubs on China's flanks, making it easy for Chinese fliers to get to the U.S. via, say, Incheon International Airport near Seoul, where the connection times are quick, no transit visas are needed and the shopping is popular. Korean Air alone serves 10 U.S. destinations nonstop from Seoul, and flies from Seoul to more than 20 cities in China.
John Jackson, Korean Air's vice president of sales and marketing for the Americas, figures that a "double-digit" percentage of Korean's revenue generated between the U.S. and Asia comes from Chinese passengers. Mr. Jackson said as Chinese carriers expand and the "restrictive" U.S.-China air treaty is eased, other Asian countries could see fewer connecting Chinese fliers.
Rival western airlines also are strengthening their China ties. Delta rival United Continental Holdings Inc., which has more flights to China than any other U.S. carrier, works closely with its partner Air China Ltd., that nation's largest carrier. The KLM Royal Dutch Airlines unit of Air France-KLM SA has stepped up its cooperation with China Southern Airlines Co., said Pieter Elbers, KLM's chief operating officer.
In Delta's exchange program last year, a dozen English-speaking middle managers from China Eastern spent three months at the U.S. carrier's base, studying everything from scheduling to corporate sales to frequent-flier programs. They shadowed their Delta peers in Atlanta and around the U.S. before returning home just before Christmas. Delta has a similar program with its other partner, China Southern.
During their Atlanta sojourn, Wang Lei, a manager in China Eastern's ground operations, and Yuan Shuai, a transfer services manager, identified some glitches in the process of transferring Delta and China Eastern passengers and luggage at Los Angeles International Airport. As one result, when Chinese fliers land at LAX on China Eastern flights, they are now given "transfer cards" that explain in Chinese how to retrieve luggage, navigate through immigration, and find Delta gates in another terminal.
"The Chinese guys at LAX say, 'How do I get to Delta?'" said Mr. Yuan. "They need a map."
Delta's hub operations dwarf those of its partners. At its largest hub, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Delta transfers about 153,000 passengers a day to or from about 1,000 flights. China Eastern transfers about 5,000 passengers daily at its hub at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, said Mr. Yuan.
The China Eastern operation has numerous hitches. Mr. Yuan said passengers from domestic Chinese cities need to go through a second security check when they transit at Pudong onto another flight. Suitcases take up to 45 minutes to transfer. And China Eastern splits its flights between Pudong, where the majority are international, and primarily domestic Hongqiao International Airport, nearly 30 miles across town.
Delta and China Eastern have been working in earnest for about two years to address these challenges. Last year China Eastern helped Delta's efforts with Chinese regulators to win better takeoff and landing times for its flights to Pudong from Detroit and to Beijing from Detroit. That allowed China Eastern to tweak its departure and arrival times to domestic cities it serves to build tighter connections for Delta passengers arriving in Shanghai and Beijing and heading to other Chinese destinations.
Last summer, China Eastern and Delta inaugurated a "through transfer" program for passengers taking a domestic flight and switching to international one, and vice versa. This lets them check bags through to their final destination and get all their boarding passes at once. A standard for Delta flights in other parts of the world, this system was new to China.
"The old service mode is in the past," said Rong Xiangying, a manager in China Eastern's frequent-flier program, at the end of his Atlanta visit. "We go everywhere to learn something new. We can do service a new Chinese way."
Source: Wall Street Journal by Susan Carey
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