The Survey Has Expired

After more than a year away, I was thrilled to be going to Türkiye in August 2026 to see my family and friends. I had only 2 weeks. Into them I had to fit plenty of catching up, brutal jet lag, intercity travel, rest, fun, shared meals, laughter and, of course, medical checkups. And since we had to skip the Aegean coast in 2025, I had also vowed to practically live in the water 🙂 (Because of how busy I was before this trip, I also had to take a long break from writing, and therefore from the newsletter. Thank you for your understanding.)

In the middle of all this, Air Transat, which I flew both ways, sent me a survey right after my flight to Istanbul to find out how it had gone. It also reminded me a few times during those packed 2 weeks. I had quite a few problems, big and small, on the way to Istanbul. I was eager to share them, but between my hectic schedule and lack of sleep, I had no energy to spare for it. I told myself I’d do it for each flight separately once I got back. But Air Transat apparently saw things differently: when I tried the survey after returning to Ottawa, I was greeted by the strange screen you see below.

The screen I was greeted with 🙃 There is no alternative feedback channel on the screen. Screenshot: Atasun Kaşbaş.

There is nothing else on the screen. No explanation, no alternative, no “you can write to us here” link, nothing. Just a language selection box and a closed door. And let’s not even get into how rude the wording is.

Those who complain about low response rates are often the ones closing the door

I am not writing about this as a personal grievance. What I went through on the flight could have been made up for; the real issue is what came after.

For years, one of the classic refrains in the customer experience world has been “customers don’t fill out surveys anymore.” Then comes the fix: let’s cut the number of questions, send reminders more often, maybe add a prize drawing. How many organizations ever ask how long the survey should stay open, and whether that fits the customer journey and the customer data they hold? As in the Air Transat case, this usually looks like a technical setting, not a CX decision.

Yet the lifespan of a feedback link is the most honest record of a brand’s assumptions about its customers. And the message I got was this: We assume your life revolves around us. For an airline, that assumption is especially strange, because this industry sells precisely the moments when people step out of their normal lives. Expecting someone on vacation to fill out a survey means forgetting what your product is for.

Having the journey data but not tying the survey window to it

The frustrating part is that the data was not missing. The company had my outbound and return dates. Tying the survey’s validity period to those two dates is not conceptually hard. What is hard is getting two systems to talk to each other. The booking side sits in one place, the feedback side in another, and there is nobody in between.

I see the same disconnect all the time in Türkiye, too. A bank’s texted survey link expires forty-eight hours after the transaction, even though the same bank knows from card activity that its customer is abroad that week. In e-commerce, the survey link is tied to the moment of delivery, even though the box may have sat with the building or complex staff for three days. The insurer asks about satisfaction the moment the claim file is closed, when the customer has not even gotten the car back yet. Every time, the measurement calendar is built around the company’s operational calendar, not the customer’s life.

I wrote earlier that while customers’ patience lasts three minutes, automation is still checking its own watch. This incident is the mirror image of the same mistake: this time the customer is patient, even overly eager; it is the brand that rushes and gives up.

A filter that weeds out the customer who would write the most

When you narrow a feedback window, you need to think about who you are losing.

The person you lose is not the one who would type “it was fine” and move on. That person already took care of it on day one, with a few taps on the phone while getting off the plane. The person you lose is the one who would sit down, set aside fifteen minutes, explain step by step what went wrong, where and how, and even suggest solutions. In other words, the one who would contribute the most to your program.

In the entries I read and the presentations I watched as a judge for international CX awards, this is what I saw most often: everyone said “we listen to the voice of the customer,” but very few had thought about where and when that voice might come from. The entries that impressed me most were not from those who had built the most advanced platform, but from those who had built their feedback process around the customer’s life. This distinction is easy to see from the judges’ table; it is hard to see on your own screen.

Nothing behind the closed door

I don’t think the real problem is even that the survey expired. Letting a survey expire is a choice, and a debatable one. But showing the customer no other path once it expires is a design flaw, and there is nothing debatable about it.

If there had been a single line on that screen — “This link has expired; you can send us your feedback here” — the whole matter would have been settled. Instead, I am now spending my own time looking for a channel where I can submit my feedback. In other words, as a customer, I am putting in effort to do the brand a favor. At a time when I believe the brand that doesn’t wear customers out wins, giving feedback has itself become one more source of customer effort. The irony still amuses me.

I have written before that in air travel and hospitality, the experience is tested when things go wrong. Now I am adding one more item: the experience is also tested after the flight is over, by how ready the brand is to listen to you. The last step of the journey is not the landing; it is whether what you want to say actually reaches someone.

Closing

I did not write this to blame an airline. What Air Transat did is simply a visible example of something extremely common in the industry.

Most of us review the survey questions over and over, debate the design and report the metric every week. But we never check how many days the link stays open, what the customer sees when it expires, or whether that screen leaves any other door open.

Do you know what your customers see today when your survey link expires? If not, it is worth checking after reading this. That may be where the most expensive line item in your voice of the customer (VoC) program is hiding.

Update note (October 14, 2026): When this piece was moved to The CX Brief, time references were updated and typos were corrected. The content and views of the piece are unchanged.