Beyond the bot: Building empathetic customer experiences with agentic AI
Beyond the bot: Building empathetic customer experiences with agentic AI
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/beyond-the-bot-building-empathetic-customer-experiences-with-agentic-ai?stcr=52FE79AA01554E039284A824CE7E6103&cid=mgp_opr-eml-alt-mop-mgp-glb--&hlkid=81f434dabaeb48d2a312d69f4b669e5b&hdpid=3020901d-4a3c-47cf-a1ee-0713c9242bc6
Gadi Shamia is the CEO and cofounder of Replicant. Eric Buesing is a partner in McKinsey’s Charlotte office. Daphne Luchtenberg is a director of communications in the London office.
As agentic AI escapes pilot purgatory, more businesses are bringing best-in-class AI capabilities into their call centers—transforming operations and fundamentally improving customer experiences.
Customer care is changing rapidly as businesses continue to automate different touchpoints. Some organizations are on the way to automating as much as 70 percent of customer contact, with others playing catch-up. Daphne Luchtenberg is joined by Eric Buesing, a McKinsey partner and global head of the firm’s customer service operations group, and Gadi Shamia, CEO and cofounder of Replicant, a leading AI-powered contact-center automation platform. Together, they bring us the trends and context that are shaping customer care today and share their advice for leaders looking to get the most out of AI for customer experience.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Your company’s future success demands customer-focused, agile, resilient, and efficient operations. I’m your host, Daphne Luchtenberg, and you’re listening to McKinsey Talks Operations, a podcast where the world’s C-suite leaders and McKinsey experts cut through the noise and uncover how to create a new operational reality.
Priorities for customer care professionals have converged over the past decade. Customer satisfaction remains the number one priority, but improving operations, implementing the right tech, and generating revenue are closing the gap. The pace of change is accelerating, and new forces are helping AI scale faster—raising the bar for both tech and human performance.
Here to talk about the state of customer care in 2025 are Eric Buesing, a McKinsey partner based in our Charlotte office and global head of our customer service operations group, and Gadi Shamia, the CEO and cofounder of Replicant, a leading contact-center automation platform powered by AI. Thank you for joining us.
Eric Buesing: Hi, Daphne. Thanks. I’m really excited for the discussion today.
Gadi Shamia: Thank you for having me. I’m excited about this conversation.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Eric, I’d like to start with you. What are you seeing today in the landscape of customer care?
Eric Buesing: Care, and even customer operations more broadly, has massive, massive potential to be disrupted. This is not a function that is a stranger to change, but I think something feels different, particularly in the past two years. We’re seeing new capabilities really come into focus. And these are coming in the form of new tools that employees and customers alike are starting to take advantage of. I also think what’s different is that leaders are taking notice, too. This is more of a CEO agenda than it’s ever been before. And we recently surveyed and captured insights from 440 executives across industries. And it offered us, I think, one of the clearest pictures of how AI maturity is really starting to evolve and separate what we call leaders and laggards.
In our survey, leaders comprise the top 10 percent of the respondents, and laggards were at the bottom 30 percent. And what we really started to see, and what we’re learning, is that leaders are separating from the pack. They are building the AI muscle to scale. They’re pursuing gains in customer experience, efficiency, sales, and growth. And they’re starting to see AI as the future of what I’ll call full-service care.
Opposite of that, laggards in some of the organizations that we’ve interacted with are more hesitant to let go of what I’ll call the human-only model.
Gadi Shamia: I truly agree with you that we are in this good-to-great moment. The ones today that automate, the ones that don’t automate, the ones that use AI, and the ones that don’t use AI look pretty similar because for both of them, the majority of customer service is still being done in a more traditional way. Give it a couple of years, and you’re going to start seeing pretty radical differences between the companies that still keep their customers on hold and the companies that automate, with every task or 80 percent of the tasks in the contact center being achieved in under 120 seconds.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Gadi, tell us first a little bit more about how the technology of conversational AI has actually evolved. What is possible today?
Gadi Shamia: The early AI agents were using AI to navigate a preexisting map. If the road was paved, we could take you down that road or even jump you to a different location, but you always had to land back on a paved road. The biggest difference today, and what opens up endless opportunities, is that modern AI agents don’t follow a fixed path or flow. Instead, they work toward a set of tasks and goals, guided by instructions and examples of good and bad behavior. That gives them a level of flexibility that is often better than what humans can achieve.
Daphne Luchtenberg: And Eric, with that evolution, how should we be starting to think about agentic in a customer care setting?
Eric Buesing: I think that the terms agentic and agentic AI are thrown out a lot, an almost catch-all for everything, like digital was 15 years ago. Personally, I like to think of agentic AI agents like LEGO blocks. Each one is a small, specialized AI worker that’s designed to do just one thing and do that one thing really well. It might be like fetching the right document, running quick math or metrics checks, scheduling a meeting with a technician, critiquing an output, or checking compliance.
On their own, they’re simple and focused. When you connect them together, just like when you put LEGOs together, they form really complex structures and workflows. And when they do form these structures, they operate very much like you would when interacting with another human. They can reason. They can prioritize. They can remember current and past interactions. And they do things faster, without wait times.
And as Gadi mentioned, they converse in a much more natural and conversational way. The AI can be more casual, more familiar. You might even term it playful in some of the right inquiry types. And we might be approaching a period where we start to see some interactions and inquiries where customers prefer interacting with AI rather than, say, a human agent.
Daphne Luchtenberg: I was getting quite excited about that, coming into all of the calls that I have to make to retailers and others. I’m not really seeing that yet today, but if we go back to Gartner in 2023, they were saying there would be an 80 percent adoption of gen AI in customer care by the end of 2025.
What are we really seeing? Eric, I’d love to hear your thoughts first on that.
Eric Buesing: I think that was right in the height of the hype cycle, right? When generative AI was being introduced, it was exciting, and it still is. I’d say most organizations are doing something in AI. And the majority of what I’ve seen is that it’s focused on helping internal employees.
There was also, even more recently, an MIT report, I think it was in August, that created a lot of buzz. It was The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025. And I think, to summarize what it was saying, was that 95 percent of gen AI pilots were delivering little to no measurable impact to the P&L. And that created a lot of buzz. And I do think there’s something there. I don’t know if it’s 95 percent, because I certainly see organizations that are achieving impact to the P&L, but we’re seeing some use cases where internal employees are using it at scale. It could be called summarization or searching on behalf of the agent or the customer faster. So there are cases, but I’d say generally the pace of deployment and adoption by end customers has been slower.
But I do believe—and we saw this in our survey—that leaders are pushing ahead. They’re building that muscle, and they’re starting to see momentum in unleashing kind of a delightful AI experience to their customers. And I think we’re just going to see more and more of that.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Gadi, would you agree?
Gadi Shamia: Yes. To give you a little bit of perspective on being in this conversation for six years now, AI, for many companies in the past two years, was a shiny object, and IT wanted to try it out. They wanted to get their hands dirty. They wanted to try something. And they were deceived by the simplicity of building a demo with AI. And you see it not only in large companies; you see very busy people building an app on the side, like a passion app, and ship it, which is something they could not have done two, three, or four years ago without quitting their day jobs.
So it’s much easier to create a demo. It’s much easier to create a very basic solution. It’s as hard to create a product that will work at scale, that will stay updated, that will be resilient, and so on. It became pretty deceiving because building, say, your own CRM instead of using Salesforce was a very daunting, not glamorous task. Building a cute AI demo that does call summarizations or some voice automation, which the CEO can test, is actually pretty easy. But getting to the full solution is pretty hard.
I totally agree that the Gartner prediction is correct. Everybody’s trying AI, but very few people are successful.
Daphne Luchtenberg: So, Gadi, how do these companies, how will they get their customers comfortable with the agent, and allow the agent to do that work for them?
Gadi Shamia: I actually think it’s not about the customers. I think it’s about the companies. I think there’s not much that companies can do other than put it out there and make sure they choose the right technology, and that, collectively, the high tide will raise all boats. But as consumers, when we call one good bot and another good bot, we need to erase 20 years of speaking with terrible IVRs [interactive voice response], and that wouldn’t happen overnight.
Now there are things we can do as the technology advisers of this company that have to do with conversation design, and maybe we can open up on this topic a little bit because it’s not discussed a lot.
There’s a whole art to it. We hired our first conversation designer in early 2020. We have a very large team, including PhDs, that does research and advises our customers around that. And this is actually how you do it. You deploy it. You deploy it well with flexible technology. You design it well, so the UX is good. And it might not help with a person the moment they hear, “I’m an AI agent,” or when a core line says, “agent, agent, agent.” But over time, these people are going to get used to having more, better experiences and will give more agents a chance.
Eric Buesing: I agree with you, Gadi. I think the experience matters tremendously. The technology does work and will work even better in the future, but the experience needs to be surprising and delightful. The quality of the response, the latency of how long it takes to respond, the casualness of the free-flowing nature of that response—all of these things matter just as much as how effective and quick that agent can resolve the issue.
And where we’re heading with this theme of empathy is the question: Can an agentic AI voice agent be empathetic? And it’s probably how you define empathy, right? That feels like a very human-to-human word.
But if you think about it more, it's about understanding and being able to recognize when a human needs a different type of interaction. Now, maybe you could interpret this as empathy: It remembers what the customer asked last time. It remembers interactions that garnered the right responses, and it can change its pitch, tone, and speech to demonstrate that type of understanding. And I think another thing is that an agentic agent never gets frustrated. It can always remain on an even keel and calm, especially when we’re talking about sensitive topics. We’re going back to this idea of “Are there certain inquiries we’ll see leading from the front where people prefer to interact with AI?”
And I think we should expect this. I think we should expect this from the AI. And very transparently, I don’t think there’s enough thought put into that experience. There’s a lot of technical thought put into making it work and not enough on how do we make it, as I said, surprising and delightful, because that will cause the individual who might have said “representative” in the first five seconds to pause and listen and say, “Well, that’s different. Let me engage with it.” And if it continues to be interesting and continues to have that understanding, I think you start to see greater and greater adoption.
Daphne Luchtenberg: So we’ve kind of sketched out what “great” looks like, Eric and Gadi, and I’m getting quite excited about my next call with a customer care center. But we’ve obviously talked a lot in the past about pilot purgatory, particularly when it comes to any kind of digital transformation.
That is also a phenomenon in this evolution, right? Can you talk a little bit more about that, Eric?
Eric Buesing: This has to be a top-of-the-house priority. And it doesn’t mean it has to be the CEO, but it has to be a leader who is senior enough to have the influence so that these investments get the attention that they need. I think that’s one. I think another one is picking a few areas to really place bets versus trying AI everywhere.
I think another thing is starting to think about scaling and the measurement, the KPIs that you’ll use from the beginning. And that means investing in the change management, investing in the adoption from the start.
If it’s for employees, it’s helping them understand the importance of how this actually benefits them. And in some cases, putting in means by which to tie the AI to their performance. I think that’s another thing.
I also think getting out of pilot purgatory means both funding the initiative fully and having the right talent assigned to lead it, technically from both the business side and from the product side. And that talent, the people who you put against it, they need to believe in it, too. This can’t be an assigned project where you just go launch AI. You have to have leaders who are excited about it, who believe that this is the future, and they’re willing to bring together, as I mentioned, the leaders from business, from product, from tech, to collaborate together in order to get to an outcome.
Gadi Shamia: I would say the first thing I would ask a company is, do you need a pilot? And there are times when you do need a pilot and times when you don’t. For example, I will tell you about our first pilot, which was with DoorDash in 2019. DoorDash came to us and said, " Can you automate outbound food orders for us? And we said, we think we can.
But what they had, which was a game-changer for us, was a metric. They said, if you can successfully automate 70 percent of these calls in 2019, this is the ROI we’re going to get. This is the impact on customer satisfaction for a variety of reasons. And this will be a very successful pilot for us.
So this pilot was excellent for two reasons. One, it had a clear goal: a 70 percent success rate. There was a way to measure its success. The second was that we didn’t know if we could do it, and we couldn’t prove to DoorDash that we could do it. It was absolutely an experiment, which is why it was a great idea for a pilot. We ran it for two weeks, we got to 74 percent—I still remember it—and then it took a year with procurement to get the deal done, and DoorDash is still a customer. So that’s a great example of when a pilot is needed.
Daphne Luchtenberg: And Gadi, what other things do organizations need to do or change to really make this bold move?
Gadi Shamia: Two things come to mind. We’re at a point where technology is not your limiting factor. The limiting factor is the willingness to change, and the organizational changes that need to happen when AI gets to automate 50 to 60 percent of your volume. The second is API. This is the most mundane thing. If companies had used all the time they spent, all the engineering hours, months, and years on trying to build AI solutions already built by vendors, and instead of that, had open APIs to transact on behalf of the customer, they would have been in a much better place.
Everything that we need to do, every agentic action, needs to be supported by an API or multiple APIs. They’re not hard to build, depending on the system you use, but they’re always deprioritized. And they are the limiting factors right now to get from the 2, 3, 5 percent automation some companies see to the 50, 60 percent.
So if I’m a CEO now and I want to drive my agenda, I’m actually talking with my CIO about APIs, and what’s the road map, and what’s the limitations on opening up every single user interface field that a human agent has access to that needs to be supported by an API. Otherwise, you’re going to be stuck very quickly with building FAQ bots that no one wants to interact with.
And the third, and maybe the most interesting one, is that people need to think outside the box because a lot of the conversations I hear are “we used to do it with humans, and we want to do it with AI agents right now.” And I would say that’s interesting, and that’s an easy one because you can map it one-to-one. But what about the things you don’t do with humans, because they’re just not scalable? If you’re a large moving company, you don’t have the capacity to check in with every customer 30 minutes into the move about customer satisfaction.
But what will be the impact on customer retention, on customer satisfaction, on decreasing post-move complaints, if you can, exactly at the half-hour point when the move starts, place a call and have an intelligent conversation with someone about their moving experience? So don’t overthink what you used to do, because you made decisions through a limitation of the human model. You can now make new decisions without those limitations, and they will look different.
So maybe it goes to this third part, which is AI does not need to mimic what humans used to do, not only in the use cases, but even in how you handle the specific use cases that humans used to do. Take a step back and rethink what you would do when you have unlimited elasticity and inexpensive capacity to create this change for your business? What are your goals, and how could you map these goals into the capabilities of a technology?
Daphne Luchtenberg: That is wonderful to hear. It sounds to me that you’re both saying there is no holding back anymore. This is now becoming a conversation at the highest levels of the organization. CEOs are really excited about this as a prospect as well. But if you look to the future, what kind of advice would you give now, Eric, to any business that has a customer front line and needs to think about innovating it? What should they be thinking about right now to move into the leader quadrant? Eric, first to you, and then I’ll finish with you, Gadi.
Eric Buesing: I’d say two things. One is that it is still easy to get enamored by a new, shiny object. And I would encourage leaders and organizations to have an independent view, their view of specifically where and how AI and agentic can both change the experience materially, but also show up in the P&L. What’s that path all the way through? I think that’s one.
And the second piece of advice I’d give is to be prepared to challenge the way things are done today in the organization. Challenge the norms. Be prepared to ask tough questions about risk tolerance. Be prepared to challenge model risk management. Be prepared to challenge through mindsets that the change isn’t possible, that customers won’t adopt this, or that employees won’t use it.
I think we have to really ask ourselves—to get to a new model, we have to think differently—and how are we going to think differently to get there?
Daphne Luchtenberg: Gadi, what do you think?
Gadi Shamia: I completely agree with Eric on his points. The one I would maybe add to be more specific is when you think about your customer service operations in a world in which half your calls, maybe next year, 70 percent of your calls and end chats are fully automated, it’s a whole redesign. And the redesign is not only from a software perspective.
You may have used a specific contact-center solution or scheduling solution that met the requirements when every single conversation would have been handled by an agent, and now, all of a sudden, when almost every conversation is handled by AI, it requires you to reassess every piece of software you have, and ask yourself, do I need the software anymore? I may not need this complex scheduling software anymore, because my scheduling task has now become much simpler.
The second question I would ask leaders is what do you want to do? How do you want to change your customer service when everything transactional is going to be automated? If you invest in it, it’s going to happen before you can even make an organizational change. So it’s time to think about it now. What do you want your human touch to look like?
I talked with a CEO of a large retailer, and they have a vision in which their human agents are actually more like customer success managers, more of the B2B model where a human agent actually does not speak with all the customers. Whenever a random person calls, they’re assigned to a group of 100, 150 top buyers of this brand who know a little bit about them, have the personal record, and can make some connections that AI can mimic but not really create.
So this discussion should happen now because this change is going to happen over a long period of time. You have to find those agents who can grow to be customer success managers. You have to train them. You have to promote them. You might have to hire people from the outside who are capable of doing that. And people changes take time, so I would encourage people to actually think about head count, the type of people you need to have in this contact center of 2027, because they will have to start investing in hiring or training—or both—these people today.
Daphne Luchtenberg: Really well said. So it seems clear that the organizations that will lead in the next few years are the ones that are going to be bold enough to rewire their customer care around AI—not just seeing AI as a tool, but really as a core capability and helping them drive growth and new value-added services.
Investors bullish on New York City hotels despite development, operating challenges
Big Apple among the hardest markets to build in but the best to buy, experts say
Bar Rocco's dining area at the Kimpton Era Midtown New York. (IHG Hotels & Resorts)
https://www.costar.com/article/527291626/investors-bullish-on-new-york-city-hotels-despite-development-operating-challenges?
The 529-room Kimpton Era Midtown New York recently opened in the heart of Manhattan, steps from Rockefeller Center. A luxury property with multiple restaurants featuring celebrity chefs, the Kimpton hotel enters what appears to be a thriving market with year-round occupancies surpassing 80%.
And the fact that the Kimpton Era Midtown New York opened at all marks it as an increasing rarity for the most high-profile hotel market in the U.S.
Legislation in recent years has made it challenging to both open and operate a hotel in the Big Apple. The Kimpton Era debuts at a time when existing hotels are highly desirable as investment assets.
Luxury properties like the Kimpton Era may be the only kind of sizable hotel that might open in New York City in the near future.
“Given the extraordinarily high costs of developing a hotel in New York City, due to land and permitting costs as well as the highest real estate taxes and wage and benefit rates in the U.S., large luxury hotels are the only ones that could come close to being profitable on a stabilized basis,” said Vijay Dandapani, CEO of the Hotel Association of New York.
The first of two primary pieces of legislation that have redrawn the hospitality landscape for the city was the 2021 special permit legislation that requires a lengthy and complicated process to develop a hotel. As a result, new hotel construction dropped to near-zero after 2021 and only a handful of projects have even attempted the process.
That was followed by the 2024 Safe Hotels Act, which called for mandatory licensing, staffing mandates, direct-employment requirements for 100-plus room hotels, restrictions on subcontracting and new compliance obligations. The result: higher labor costs, less flexibility in operating models, more regulatory risk and more friction for ownership changes or management transitions.
“All business is founded and developed on the premise of continuity and reasonable certainty,” Dandapani said. “Unfortunately, New York City is a highly regulated if not over-regulated jurisdiction, particularly for hotels, with the cost of business continually changing and compliance costs increasing.”
Daniel Lesser, CEO of LW Hospitality Advisors, said the rationale behind these two pieces of legislation was to ensure union labor is involved in both developmental and operational aspects of hotels. Even existing owners who didn’t necessarily have to deal with union-related issues in the past may have to do so as a result of the legislation.
Before the 2021 legislation was even passed, an article in The New York Times foresaw the challenges. The Hotel Trades Council has long pushed to limit the construction of new hotels, which are often nonunion. Its calculation has been that limiting the development of such hotels, which typically offer less expensive lodging than existing full-service hotels, would tend to increase hotel room prices generally and bolster the higher-end hotels where many of its workers are employed.
And just recently, the American Hotel & Lodging Association submitted testimony to the New York City Council warning that provisions in the city’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget could increase costs for hotels and threaten jobs.
AHLA’s testimony addressed proposed changes to the corporate tax structure and the pass-through entity tax, stating that these changes could increase costs for hotel owners, including small business operators structured as partnerships or S corporations, as well as other small businesses supporting hotels. The association also cited a proposed 9.5% increase in the city’s real property tax, noting this could further strain hotel finances as operating costs continue to rise.
Over the past five years, according to AHLA’s testimony, hotel operating costs in New York have increased roughly four times as fast as revenue growth.
Union officials argue that many of the new hotels that have sprung up outside Manhattan in recent years have turned into homeless shelters or have become plagued by crime. They contend that the special permit would not stop development but would ensure that it incorporates community concerns.
Despite the potential drawbacks, investors see existing New York hotels as prime investment opportunities. According to the JLL 2026 International Hotel Investment Outlook, New York was the most liquid hotel market in the U.S. in 2025. With historically low new supply because of the changes in the city’s zoning regulations and increased liquidity dynamics, according to JLL, this will create opportunities for owners looking to monetize their investments. Risks remain however, including union contract renegotiations, potentially slower international visitation and the impact of policy shifts made by the new mayoral administration.
Kevin Davis, Americas CEO for JLL Hotels & Hospitality, said that in 2025 New York saw over $3.7 billion in transactions. There were legacy projects prior to 2021 that will get delivered. Beyond the next 12 to 24 months, there won’t be significant additional hotel supply in New York, he said.
The 2024 Safe Hotels Act effectively made it difficult for non-union hotels to contract with third-party labor in operating hotels, Davis said. There is concern that this legislation would compel non-union hotels to emulate unionized hotels in some ways. Since those regulations took hold, there has been a robust sales market in the city.
As a result of these laws and others, investors can buy hotels in New York at half of what it costs to build them, Davis said.
“Why build when you can buy at 50 cents on the dollar?” he asked. “When you layer in the 24- to 36-month permit process, you are talking about roughly six years from the time you decide you want to build a hotel until it opens with no cash flow.”
Davis agrees that luxury hotels are the most economically viable option with the city “relatively undersupplied” in that segment.
And the recently enacted laws on “junk fees” are another issue to consider. This legislation is a 2026 consumer-protection rule that bans hidden mandatory hotel fees and undisclosed credit-card holds. It is one of the strongest local crackdowns on hotel pricing transparency in the U.S.
The rules make it a deceptive trade practice for any hotel or booking platform to advertise a room rate without clearly showing the full price, including all mandatory fees.
This covers:Resort fees, destination fees, hospitality fees or any other mandatory charge not included in the advertised price.
Mandatory credit-card holds or deposits that aren’t disclosed upfront, including the amount and when the hold will be released.
Hotels must now present one total price at the moment of advertising or booking — no more adding fees at checkout.
The supply-demand imbalance for the future, as well as strong operating performance, will continue to make New York a top investment market globally, Davis said. The city will also gain disproportionate benefits from the FIFA World Cup with the final match just a few miles away in New Jersey. Lesser said the market is poised to benefit even more from the large numbers of hotel rooms that have been removed from the inventory. For instance, The Roosevelt Hotel, with almost 1,000 rooms, may never return as a hotel because it is physically and functionally obsolete. Other properties are in a similar position.
On the other hand, Row NYC, a 1,300-room hotel in the Times Square area that had been shuttered for several years, will reopen on May 1 after an extensive renovation. During the period of the city’s migrant crisis, the property had been one of the larger migrant shelters.
While he is unaware of any hotel projects that have been shelved because of the legislation, Dandapani said since the introduction of the Citywide Special Permit only one hotel has been able to run the gauntlet of rules and processes and successfully secured a permit: the Hard Rock Hotel, part of the Metropolitan Park Casino development at Willets Point, near Citi Field, home of the New York Mets.
Looking ahead, Davis said with union negotiations slated to be wrapped up this summer, investors may be taking a wait-and-see approach. Once there is clarity on the collective bargaining agreement, there should be a substantial uptick in investment, he said.
JLL is “incredibly bullish” on New York, Davis said. It’s been a long time since there has been this level of excitement in the city.
“New York is on steroids,” he said, “and no new supply makes investments even more desirable.”
Desperate Travelers Shell Out $70 an Hour for TSA ‘Line Sitters’
https://www.fodors.com/news/news/desperate-travelers-shell-out-70-an-hour-for-tsa-line-sitters
Long airport security lines are driving travelers to hire professional line-sitters to hold their place in TSA queues as staffing shortages disrupt airports.
Holding someone’s place in a queue for money isn’t a new concept. Professional line-sitters have been around for years, typically holding a premium spot in a line-up to wait for concert tickets, tennis shoes, hot restaurants, or new iPhones.
Those lines, however, were static, and you could sit down, entirely different from the stop-and-go trudge of the airport security line. At some airports, like Bush Intercontinental in Houston, where TSA absenteeism has reduced staffing and closed checkpoints, the waits have been reported to stretch out for hours.
At least one entrepreneur has offered up his services for standing in TSA lines. The Washington Post reports Steven Dial, a Houston resident and owner of the assistance service Dial Signature Solutions, is offering to wait in lines for travelers. He charges $65 per hour in addition to his parking cost of $5 per hour, and will take up a place in the security line for travelers.
Once the traveler is ready to take over, he’ll swap out with them, saying there’s no ethical question, as the number of people waiting in line doesn’t change—it’s a one-for-one transaction.
TSA doesn’t appear to have an issue with the practice, for they don’t control the queues in the lobby—their jurisdiction starts at the I.D. check. Airports, for their part, haven’t explicitly banned the practice, but they don’t recommend that travelers use them, because they’re not vetted.
The need for a line-sitter may be short-lived. TSA agents have begun receiving back pay for the paychecks they’ve missed since February 14, when funding ran out for the parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CNN reports that airport security lines have largely returned to normal, with absenteeism rates dropping. Many TSA workers who had been without paychecks found themselves having to call out from work because they could no longer pay their childcare providers and needed to look after their children themselves, or called in to do other paid work.
Future checks, however, are still not guaranteed. Congress is in the midst of a two-week recess without having come to an agreement on future funding for DHS. The executive order authorizing back pay only authorizes missed checks, and doesn’t authorize any funding for future paychecks, so if the DHS funding is still lapsed at the end of the pay period, airport waits could again increase.
The union representing TSA workers, the American Federation of Government Employees, also reported that many workers reported incorrect check amounts, missing overtime, and improper tax withholdings. The union also said that recent changes to TSA furlough policies, which previously allowed officers to request leave during shutdowns if they couldn’t get to work or find childcare, have recently changed, making it more likely officers would simply quit if they weren’t being paid.
There are other options for hiring a line sitter, but they can be expensive. TSA PreCheck and the line-skipping service CLEAR+ are still available. For travelers who don’t want to go through the vetting processes for a single trip, there are VIP services like Perq Soleil and SkySquad, which offer airport meet and assist services, and have priority line access at some airports.
The private airport terminal service PS, available in Los Angeles and Atlanta, with locations in Dallas and Miami coming soon, offers a private, separate terminal with its own screening checkpoint to travelers willing to fork over four figures. When it’s time to board, travelers are driven directly to their aircraft from the private terminal.
The DHS shutdown stretched into its 45th day on Monday, eclipsing the record set by the full government shutdown last fall, which lasted 43 days.
Southwest Is Fat Shaming, Travelers Say
Hairem/Shutterstock
https://www.fodors.com/news/news/southwest-is-fat-shaming-travelers-say
The airline was once a favorite of plus-size passengers.
Travelers are feeling nervous about flying with Southwest Airlines. The airline recently reversed its plus-size passenger-friendly policies, and fliers allege that the airline is charging them a “fat tax.”
Many have spoken about being singled out at the gate to buy additional seats. One of them is hairstylist Erika DeBoer. She was traveling with her best friend when a Southwest gate agent asked if she needed an extra seat. Caught off guard because she had never needed one, she turned it down, but the agent insisted she was required to purchase one for the safety and comfort of others. She had paid for a window seat and was sitting next to her best friend, who had no issue sitting beside her.
DeBoer says, “What is the process for you deciding that? Just looking at me? You have no clue if I can fit in the seat or not.” She asked if there was a test seat she could try, and told the supervisor she could sit in the seat without raising the armrest. But she wasn’t allowed to board and had to pay $176. She told People Magazine that Southwest has since refunded her and provided a $150 voucher. On her return flight, she did not have the same experience.
Commenters were quick to point out that tall people or men with broad shoulders are never asked to buy an extra seat, even if they encroach on others’ spaces. Many called out “corporate greed” and a “money grab” from the airline and shared stories of witnessing similar situations.
SFGate spoke with multiple passengers who said they were embarrassed by Southwest staff. One man was asked to purchase an extra ticket because of his history of doing so, but he said he hasn’t needed one in some time. Another woman was told she needed the additional seat because she was “wide at the bottom.”
Plus-size influencer Samyra called it a “fat tax” in her video. She said she was kicked off her flight in December before the new policy went into effect. “There is no criteria that they are using to determine who has to pay for an extra seat. They are literally just discriminating,” calling it fatphobia.
Other fliers have shared that they are now nervous to fly with Southwest after seeing these videos. Stella Kittrell’s one-minute video, where she records herself going through the process and hoping for the best, has been watched 3 million times. “Why am I so nervous to fly? I wore my skinniest outfit today.”
The policy is raising eyebrows because there are no written guidelines on who may be required to buy an additional seat. The airline explains that the armrest is the boundary, and anyone who lifts the armrest may be subject to an additional purchase. However, it is also dependent on the discretion of staff.
DeBoer and others have pointed out that Southwest needs to have a more objective policy to help prepare passengers. One comment on her TikTok said, “There should be a test seat, a height and weight requirement or a measurement requirement… SOMETHING objective so that people know in advance whether the policy applies to them. They do this with luggage, they can do it with people.”
There was a time when plus-size travelers preferred Southwest over other American carriers. The Dallas-based airline had a customer-friendly approach to flying, and its customer-of-size policy was certainly a winner. It allowed travelers to reserve a second seat when they made their reservation, and the cost was refunded after the flight. It also allowed fliers to get extra space at the gate without any charge. This is no longer the case.
The website now states that customers “who encroach upon neighboring seats” need to get an additional seat before travel. “The armrest is considered to be the definitive boundary between seats,” it says, and informs customers that Southwest can determine if someone needs an extra seat for safety purposes. If a gate agent or other staff member decides a passenger needs one, they must purchase it at the airport for the cost of travel that day. Passengers may be rebooked if the flight is full, and may be asked to deboard if this determination happens after boarding. Plus-size passengers are no longer guaranteed a refund; they may get one only if the flight has an open seat.
Southwest, long considered a unicorn among airlines, has lost its edge over competitors and joined the bandwagon with baggage fees and assigned seats.
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