Data integrity

As long as I’m ranting about United Airlines, here’s something else from them.

The other day I got an email inviting me to a survey about a flight I recently took. As it happens, it was the flight to RSA Conference on 24 February; nothing so far WRT the return flight on 28 February. I went through all the “did you love us” questions, broken down into pre-flight, flight and post-flight categories; generally gave them marks no higher than 4 out of 10 (I think a couple were 7, but that’s because the flight did, in fact, land at the correct destination without dropping any major aircraft parts); and then was passed on to a secondary questionnaire.

(Naturally, for any of the points where my score was below 4, they inquired solicitously how they could improve. One of my answers included the comment, “I suppose I should be grateful not to have been verbally assaulted by one of your flight attendants.” Because I’ve come to expect that from United.)

This part was to do with international flights, and it’s where the entire survey screwed the pooch. They asked how many such trips I’d taken in the previous year, and followed up with wanting to know how many of those trips involved Star Alliance partners. I answered honestly, which threw this error message:

WTAF?

I do not know what value they derive from building an answer set that requires delivering false data, but here we are.

(Also interesting that United are not listed as a Star Alliance airline; they certainly are.)

I went back to see who’d designed the survey, because recently I took something run by Medallia, which is a top-notch voice-of-the-customer outfit; nope, this was some company called MarketMind, based in Austria. (Ah, ha! Just realized the Medallia survey was for my stay at the Marriott Marquis during RSA. Now, I did get a giggle about the questions on whether I thought the hotel bar was trendy enough, but the survey as a whole was very professional.)

Well, I know nothing about these MarketMind folks, but this kind of thing is bad survey design and bad research practice. So I lied my way through the rest of the questionnaire and filed it away for a post here. I’m curious as to whether UAL will send me another survey for the return flight.