"That will be slow," Daniel said. "Some of those records are scattered across old databases."
"Then it will take time," she answered. "I should have asked years ago."
Daniel hesitated. "Grandma, you can't personally review every conversation in every airport."
"Of course I can't. That's what leadership is for. But if we find that a customer wrote to us three times and received the same meaningless response three times, I don't want to read a slide describing the case as successfully closed."
He agreed to organize the work with customer care, legal, and the independent directors. They selected cases from several airports and invited a handful of customers to discuss their experiences voluntarily. Some had already moved to other airlines and wanted little to do with Solstice; others were surprised to receive a call from anyone who seemed interested in the original concern.
One woman explained that she had been denied entry while wearing a hospital uniform and told that people who worked in the terminal could not simply wander into a premium lounge. She had been a paying member for twelve years. The manager eventually allowed her inside after verifying the account, but nobody apologized for the accusation, and the incident was entered as a resolved access question. She said the worst part had been knowing that an expensive dress would probably have prevented the suspicion entirely.
Another passenger had waited outside with his father, who had limited mobility, because the desk attendant insisted they return to a different gate for a document already visible in the system. The older man grew exhausted on the walk back, and the son filed a complaint describing how the airline's luxury hospitality had managed to make a simple delay painful. He received a standardized voucher and no acknowledgment of the difficulty his father faced.
Constance listened to the recordings of those interviews in her study. She had expected to hear anger, and there was plenty of it. What she found harder to bear was disappointment. The people speaking had trusted Solstice enough to write in the first place, believing somebody would want to know. Their disappointment was evidence that the airline had once meant something to them.
She resisted the temptation to telephone each passenger and apologize personally. An apology from the founder might have been welcome, but she wanted the people responsible for service recovery to learn how to make the correction themselves. She asked that the affected travelers be offered individualized follow-up, meaningful remedies where appropriate, and the opportunity to confirm whether the company had finally understood their concerns.
Marisol became one of the employee advisers to the review. At first she worried that sitting in a meeting with directors would distract her from the practical work of the lounge. Farrah reminded her that a management decision made without consulting frontline staff could create weeks of extra work, especially if it sounded excellent to someone who had never attempted to use it during a difficult shift.