Exclusive: Alon Lavi From ELAL Answers Your Questions
3/12/202620 min
El Al has been getting a lot of heat lately. Canceled flights, no callbacks, passengers feeling abandoned. Our community sent in hundreds of questions and I sat down with Alon Lavi, El Al's head of customer experience, to get real answers.
He's answering from a bomb shelter. That tells you everything about what they're dealing with.
We cover why flights are leaving half empty, how they're deciding who gets rebooked, the pricing controversy, and what they're doing to fix their customer service.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 0· Host0:00
Okay. Thank you so much, Alon Levy, for, for joining me. Um, it does look like you're underground right now, and I hope, you know, the, the service is okay there. But I imagine that's, that's where you are because of the circumstances that you guys are experiencing.
Alon Lavi· Guest0:13
Yes. Correct. Since, uh, February twenty-eight, uh, we moved the, uh, ops room to, um, this, uh, bomb shelter, this bunker, as we call it. And, uh, we operate, uh, from this, uh, bomb shelter twenty-four hours a day, uh, in order to have operations continuity. And, um, yeah, we are here twenty-four/seven.
Speaker 0· Host0:40
I guess for starters, if you could just give insight into what's been, what's been going on. People are obviously having their flights canceled, and they're not being rebooked, and many are seeing other smaller airlines that are flying out with even more than a hundred passengers. Um, can you give some insight into exactly what is happening?
Alon Lavi· Guest1:00
Yeah. Well, just for the timeline, okay. Since February twenty-eight, uh, what we did, first of all, is flying all the airplanes outside of Ben Gurion Airport just to keep those airplanes safe and ready for the day that we need it. Um, it took some days until the Israeli government, meaning aviation authority and security authorities, um, allow us to start