How Many PIT Employees Did You Meet Today?

From bus drivers to bartenders, Customer Service Week salutes those who make our travel a little easier

By Elise Gomez

Published October 4, 2019

Read Time: 6 mins

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How many people do you encounter when flying in or out of an airport? The bus driver in the parking lot shuttle? The agent at the ticket counter checking your bag and handing over your boarding pass?

Maybe it’s the bartender at Martini, or the agent at the front desk in the Hyatt Hotel. One way or another, you’ll likely be interacting with more than a few of the 6,405 employees at Pittsburgh International Airport.

So let’s hear it for the men and women who work every day to make your travel a little less stressful. Better yet, let’s hear from these employees, in honor of National Customer Service Appreciation Week (Oct. 7-11).


 

Richard Veney                                  Shuttle Bus Driver                      Pittsburgh Transportation Group      On the Job: 31 years

What I find interesting almost every day is when you pick up a husband, wife and kids down here on the curb and you ask them, ‘Where are you parked?’ The husband 75 percent of the time is wrong. The wife 50 percent of the time she’s wrong. The kids are right about 75 percent of the time — almost always.

So when I hear all of these different numbers getting called out when I ask, I almost always listen to the kids. The kids are normally dead on most of the time.

I like to create a positive experience for the customer by making their transition easy. They are already stressed out and worried about flights and times and how much their luggage weighs. If I can smooth some of that out by explaining what they may encounter inside the airport, I will. I try to keep a positive mood, and I’m a positive person.


Tarren (Tee) Starling                          Bartender                                                Martini Bar – Airside Center Core          On the Job: 20 years

My most impactful moment is when two sisters actually met here at the bar for the first time in their adult life. They never met each other and they only had interaction on social media. It was a Sunday morning, so the bar was empty.

They really just included me in that experience. They were laughing and crying. They were asking questions and talking to me about it. I still feel the joy from that moment. I really couldn’t get that from anywhere else. There was a lot of emotion that day.

[Martini] is not like bars anywhere else. I get to talk to people from our city. I get to talk to people from all over the country and all over the world. I get to live and have experiences through my guests.

I think [customer service] is all about exceeding the expectations of the guest. It is such a stressful environment that whenever they come to me and sit down and have a drink they forget about all the stress for just a second. Besides getting their order right