Philippine Airlines, What Happened?

I have been a loyal Philippine Airlines customer for years.

Our family travels every holiday season, and for the longest time, PAL was our airline. There was something about flying our own flag carrier that I genuinely liked.

Over the last few years, that loyalty has been tested enough times that I am reaching the point where I will actively avoid PAL whenever I have another reasonable option.

And that honestly sucks.

It started for me in 2022.

We were flying New York to Manila. We are a tall family, so I pay extra and book bulkhead seats well in advance. My son was bumped from the bulkhead seat we had paid for. We later learned the seat had apparently been given to someone connected to the crew.

PAL compensated us with miles.

Fine. Except miles were not what we wanted. We wanted the seat we selected and paid for.

Last year, when we traveled to Europe, I chose EVA Air instead. The experience was superb. Great service, good aircraft, everything simply worked.

In August, I gave PAL another shot for Toronto because the schedule worked best for us.

Again, I paid for a bulkhead seat.

This time, the inflight entertainment at my seat did not work.

The cabin crew did everything they could. They tried to fix it and eventually offered to move me. The only available seat was a regular one, which brought me right back to the same problem. I had specifically paid for the bulkhead.

So I stayed there for the flight with no working entertainment.

I was told PAL would compensate me with miles. They took my email address.

Several weeks later, nothing. No email. No call. Nothing.

Now we have another trip coming up.

I received an email informing me that my seat had been changed. That was it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Once again, I had paid months in advance for the seat I wanted.

I spent hours trying to get help. One agent told me the replacement was of equal value because it was also an aisle seat.

Seriously?

An aisle seat costs around $40 to select. The bulkhead seat I paid for was around $170.

When I pointed that out, getting a straight answer suddenly became very difficult. One call ended with the agent hanging up on me.

I eventually asked a very simple question. If PAL cannot provide the seat category I paid for, will you refund what I paid for that seat?

I was told no. That does not sound right.

Then there is the digital experience. Getting through chat is difficult. The AI handoff to a live agent is poor. Information I already provided has to be explained all over again. Reference numbers are issued. Promised emails never arrive.

This is where my professional side probably makes the experience even more frustrating.

I know customer experience. I have spent a huge part of my career running operations and contact centers. I know what great service looks like. I also know what struggling service operations look like.

What gets me is that I remember when you were genuinely good. I remember choosing Philippine Airlines because I wanted to fly Philippine Airlines.

Now I am going into our holiday trip already wondering what will go wrong, and how hard it will be to get someone to help if it does.

I am not writing this to berate a flight attendant or embarrass a call center agent. Some of your frontline people have genuinely tried to help me.

This feels bigger than them.

Something in the customer experience has deteriorated badly. Training, ownership, follow-through, digital support, service recovery. Somewhere along the way, the basics stopped working consistently.

I am also hearing similar stories from people in my network, which makes this even more disappointing.

And before anyone asks why I am posting this here instead of just reaching out to them. I have been trying. That is the whole point. Getting a real person on chat or on a call is an ordeal. The wait times are ridiculous. If you do not believe me, try it yourself. See how quickly you can get an actual senior manager or executive on the line.

I was a loyal customer.

Today, if another airline has a reasonable schedule for where I am going, I will explore that option first.

And I genuinely hate that this is where I am with our flag carrier.

#PhilippineAirlines #CustomerExperience #YouUsedToBeGood #ServiceRecovery #DoBetter

#PhilippineAirlines #CustomerExperience #ServiceRecovery

The Ceramic Cup (Part 2 of 2)

When I wrote Part 1, that really should have been the end of it.

I had made peace with the lesson. The cup leaves, and most of the people leave with it.

A few still reached out from time to time. They’d ask how I was doing or ask for advice about work. I always replied. That’s who I am, regardless of what seat I have.

Then, out of the blue, a note arrived.

I won’t recount all of it. What matters is that it came from someone who had no reason to reach out, wanted nothing from me, and hadn’t worked with me in years.

And basically, they were telling me that some of the things they learned working with me all those years ago were still with them. That some of it even found its way into how they lead their own people now.

That knocked the wind out of me a little.

I always look back at those years with pride. I pushed hard. I had very high standards. I still do.

But, my approach has evolved.

There are moments I would handle differently today. I always tried to see the people behind the numbers, and I know I didn’t always get it right.

So hearing years later that someone remembered the standards, and also remembered the care underneath them, meant more than I can easily explain.

That’s the other side of the ceramic cup.

The perks belong to the position. They leave when you do. What you build in people can stay long after you leave the seat. And every so often, years after you stopped holding the cup, some of it finds its way back to you.

Leadership is a long journey, and I’m still on it. The standards stay high. The approach keeps evolving.

Do the work because there is fulfillment in doing it well. Care about people even when there is nothing in it for you.

As Conan O’Brien put it, work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen. Not always right away. But it does.

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Own the Annoying Part

Own the Annoying Part

I saw a Klook ad the other day offering help getting your visa. Schengen. Australia, etc.

I could picture how it came up. Someone wanted more bookings. Someone else pointed out the obvious thing everyone had been stepping around. Plenty of people want to travel and never book, because they are stuck on the visa. It is confusing, bureaucratic, and enough of a hassle that people just give up before they spend a cent.

Most companies would call that someone else’s problem. Probably created detailed reports of how it can’t be solved.

Klook looked at the same wall and saw it differently. That visa while technically not our problem, is the thing standing between a customer and everything we want to sell them. The flights. The hotels. The tours. All of it sits on the other side of a visa nobody wants to deal with.

So they went and owned the hardest, least glamorous step in the whole journey. Because they followed the friction all the way to where the money actually stops.

The best growth ideas are rarely the exciting ones. They are usually buried in the annoying step everyone else decided was not their job to fix.

Find the thing your customers give up on. Own that. The bookings are on the other side of it.

For the record, I have no connection to Klook. This is not sponsored. I am just someone who loves to travel and genuinely admires a smart move when I see one. Though hey Klook, if you are reading this, I am right here. Big fan btw. 😂

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The Ceramic Cup (Part 1 of 2)

Many years ago, when Leaders Eat Last came out, Simon Sinek tells a story about a former Under Secretary of Defense speaking at a conference. Mid-talk, the man pauses and looks at the styrofoam cup in his hand.

He tells the room that the year before, when he still held office and spoke on that same stage, he flew business class, got picked up at the airport, was walked backstage, and handed coffee in a beautiful ceramic cup.

This year, out of office, he flew coach, took a cab, found his own way in, and poured his own coffee into styrofoam.

His lesson was simple. The ceramic cup was never for him. It was for the position. When he left, the cup went to the next person.

I understood that story when I first read it. I thought I got it.

I did not really get it until now.

For a long stretch of my career I held some very senior, high-profile positions. Large teams. Large organizations. And people parted the Red Sea for me. Doors opened. Calls got returned in minutes. People I genuinely believed were friends told me how much I meant to them.

I am in a quieter seat now. The work is more fulfilling than it has ever been, and I would never trade it in a million years. But the cup has changed.

Some of the same people who cried when I left, who professed loyalty and devotion, barely make time now.

I have said hello and gotten nothing back. And being brutally honest, I am not even reaching out because I need anything. I am not selling or have an agenda.

I just genuinely miss them.

The silence still stings a little, even though I hold no grudge and understand exactly why it happens.

Because it was never really about me. It was about the seat.

And that’s why I said, I totally get it now.

Enjoy the ceramic cup when it is handed to you, but never mistake it for something you own. The perks, the access, the sudden warmth of people around you, most of it belongs to the position and it leaves when the position does.

Be the kind of person who returns the hello after someone no longer has anything you need. That is rarer than it should be, and you find out very quickly who it is.

And do not measure your worth by how people treat you when you hold the cup. Measure it by what is left when the cup is gone.

This is a hard lesson but very real lesson. It stings to learn who was there for you and who was there for the seat.

But it builds something in you, if you let it. It teaches you to hold the cup loosely, to keep your own warmth toward people even when there is nothing in it for you, and to know exactly what your worth actually rests on.

Recently I was reminded there is another side to all of this. One I did not see coming.
That is Part 2.

#TeamLegendary#BPOEvolution#NextGenCX#FutureBPO#LGDR

People Still Matter (3 of 3): The Three Reasons You Lose Good People

People Still Matter (3 of 3): The Three Reasons You Lose Good People

Something I learned over the years, first framed around why customers buy. It explains why people stay with a leader just as well.

Pain, Process, and Purpose. You take away their pain. You make their life easier. You make them feel they are part of something bigger.

Pain. A broken process. An unfair workload. A manager who will not decide. The bigger the pain you remove, the more loyalty you earn. Most leaders let the small ones sit until they pile into a resignation nobody saw coming.

Process. Clear direction. Fast decisions. Not making good people chase three approvals to do their job. Every bit of friction you leave in their way is a tax you charge your own team, and they feel all of it.

Purpose. This is the one most leaders miss. People stay where they feel seen, trusted, like the work matters and like they matter. It is why those young agents two posts ago did not bite on more money. The money was there. The purpose was not.

You only find these by staying close enough to notice.

So if your best people are drifting, ask which of the three you stopped giving them. Pain you keep ignoring. A day you keep making harder. Or a purpose that disappeared.

Fix that, and people stay. Miss it, and no salary holds them.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

Called It. Mostly.

Sometime ago I posted my top 10 tech predictions for 2026. Today Apple announced the iPhone Duo. A foldable, premium, priced around $2,000, built as a mature design rather than a novelty grab.

That is close to what I wrote in January. So I went back to grade the whole list, hits and misses both, because anyone can make predictions and almost nobody circles back to check their own.

Here is where things ended up.

AI browsers gain real traction. Hit, with a twist. The category exploded. Comet went from around 40,000 installs to over 10 million in six months, and Google built Gemini straight into Chrome. But one of the two browsers I named, ChatGPT Atlas, was shut down in August. The trend was right. One of my named players did not survive the year.

Streaming consolidation resets the CX bar. Right force, wrong names. I said Netflix and Warner would reshape the landscape. What actually happened was a $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner, with Netflix walking away after being outbid. I saw the consolidation coming. I got the acquirer wrong.

The middle layer of work starts disappearing. Hit. Coordination, documentation, and reporting are exactly where AI is absorbing the most.

AI wearables move beyond experiments. Almost. Heading that way, not fully mainstream yet.

Laptop chips hit peak competition. Hit. Panther Lake and Snapdragon X2 made this the most competitive processor year in a long time.

OpenAI moves closer to an IPO. Pending. Closer by most reporting, not confirmed. I filed it under possible but not guaranteed, and that is exactly where it sits.

Apple ships a foldable iPhone. Hit. Announced today, premium and priced as I called it.

AI raises new data privacy and security risks. Hit. This came up constantly all year, including at SuperAI in Singapore.

AI’s environmental cost becomes
unavoidable. Hit. Now a mainstream debate.

Here is why I do this at all.

Making predictions keeps my lens pointed at the future. It forces me to look ahead on purpose, so I can prepare for what is coming or help build it. That is the whole point. Staying ready for what is next.

On to the next ten.

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People Still Matter (2 of 3): It’s Not About The Money Money Money

We took on a project no team in the company had done at this scale. Early on, one problem kept surfacing. Productivity hours kept falling below standard.

It did not add up. A good chunk of these people were proven. Reliable, strong producers on other projects. On this one, they were inconsistent, and nobody could explain why from the numbers alone.

So I did what has worked for me for +25 years. I talked to them. Focus group discussions, a few one-on-ones. Basic call center 101. Shocking, I know.

And as it turns out, the work was not hard. It was boring. “Mind-numbingly boring” was the phrase one of them used. This was never a skill problem. The task was just tedious, and the people doing it were on the younger side.

Some humbling realizations. We had been throwing incentives at it. More money for hitting the numbers. And they were not biting. As a proud Gen X’er, that is hard to fully wrap my head around, but the money was not what they wanted. What they were missing was learning. The task taught them nothing, so they quietly checked out.

Once we understood that, the fix was straightforward. We restructured the work so it was far less tedious. Productivity followed.

None of that would have happened from a dashboard. The numbers would have told me productivity was down and pointed me straight at performance management, which was the wrong answer entirely. The real reason only came out because I sat down and asked.

That is the whole point of staying close. Sometimes the problem is not the one the data is showing you, and the only way to find the real one is to talk to the people living it.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

THIS FEELS RIGHT

Early in 2025, I tried to build a practical data annotation and labeling playbook. Limited online courses, a handful of research conversations with colleagues, and a lot of piecing things together myself. I was proud of it at the time. There were some genuinely good ideas in there.

Looking back, it was the tip of the iceberg.

What I get exposed to now, what I get to build, and what I learn on an ordinary week makes that early playbook look like a first sketch. The early work was solid for what I knew then. I just could not see how much more there was from where I was standing.

Here is a glimpse of the kind of work I mean.

People listening to hundreds of thousands of voice recordings and writing down every word, in a language no software exists to transcribe. The only way to teach a machine to hear a language is for people who speak it to write down what was said.

Doctors, lawyers, and finance specialists reading two AI answers to the same question and deciding which is better, then explaining why. That written explanation is the real product. It is how a model learns what a good answer looks like in a field where being confidently wrong is dangerous.

Footage recorded from a camera on a person’s head, labeled frame by frame, so a machine can learn to see the world the way a human actually sees it rather than from a fixed camera on a wall.

Earlier in the year I already felt like this was the right path. What I did not know was how much room there was to grow into it.

That room, and how fast it keeps opening, is the most energizing thing about where I am right now.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

People Still Matter (1 of 3)

Fired Up, Then Let Down

Everything is moving toward AI and automation, and it is easy to believe you can run a team from a dashboard. This is a three-part case for why staying close to your frontline matters now more than ever.

During an FGD a while back, one of the agents asked me a simple question. What is the future of the account.

On the surface it was a normal question. But something in how he asked it did not sit right. It felt like a stand-in for something else. So I kept asking.

This agent was good. Genuinely good. Strong with technology, C1 language, sharp instincts, the kind of person you notice without having to look hard. And he was not chasing anything. He was not in anyone’s office asking about promotion.

Leadership came to him. Unprompted. They told him he was being lined up for a promotion because he was that good.

Then they took it back. The client changed direction for the LOB he supported or something.

Later they came again. A different move this time, a possible supervisor role. He let himself believe it a second time.

Then they took that back too. A hiring freeze.

Here is what that sequence did. A highly motivated contributor turned into someone who just clocks in. He is still good at his job, the skill did not go anywhere. But the part of him that cared beyond the minimum is now gone… and that is on leadership. Not on him.

I do not know what the approach was supposed to be. If they wanted to retain him because he was excellent, then keep your word. If there was nothing concrete to offer, then do not dangle the one thing you cannot deliver. Dangling promotion is the lazy way to motivate someone. There are other ways to make a good person feel valued that do not require a promise you might have to break.

I would never have known any of this from a dashboard. His numbers were still fine. Nothing about him would have shown up as a problem in a report. The only reason I found out was because I was sitting in a room with the frontline, and because when he asked a vague question, I asked more.

That is the whole point of staying close. The most important things happening to your people rarely announce themselves. You have to be near enough to feel when a simple question is actually carrying something heavier.

More on that in this series.

#TeamLegendary#BPOEvolution#PragmaticLeadership#NextGenCX#FutureBPO#LGDR

You Dont Always Need ROI

A LONG time ago, I asked to attend an AI conference. I was a senior leader running future-focused programs, and part of my mandate was to stay at the forefront of where technology was heading. The event was directly relevant. I explained why.

The response was that I would need to put together an ROI document.

That was a completely reasonable ask. It is standard practice, it is what good governance looks like, and I understood the logic behind it. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else.

I did not fight it. I also did not go. I ended up watching YouTube recaps of the event instead. 😂

That was likely on me. I could have pushed. I could have built the case and connected the dots for them. I did not, and I own that.

Recently I asked to attend another one. Similar event, similar cost, similar reasoning. The answer came back almost immediately. Approved, go for it.

That speed was not carelessness. The judgment had already been done. The space was understood, the reasoning was clear, and the trust was already there.

Here is what I keep thinking about.
The outputs were not that different. I got good ideas from the YouTube recaps. I got good ideas from the event I attended. If you scored both on a spreadsheet, you might call it a wash.

What was completely different was everything the spreadsheet could not capture. One left me discouraged. The other left me energized, connected to people I would never have met otherwise, and feeling genuinely good about the whole thing.

No ROI document has a field for that.

There is no line item for a senior leader who quietly stops asking. No metric captures the difference between someone who feels trusted and someone who learned that the effort of asking is not worth it.

There is such a thing called VOI. Value on Investment exists because ROI leaves out morale, engagement, and trust.

Process matters. I am not arguing for throwing it out. I am saying the friction a request carries should reflect what is already known about the person asking and what is actually at stake in the answer.

What is a leader worth when they feel trusted? What does it cost when they stop asking?

Trust your people. Especially the ones who have already proven they deserve it. That trust comes back to you in ways no report will ever capture.

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