- Frontier Airlines has scrapped its telephone customer service line.
- The airline has switched to chat to give information as "efficiently" as possible, CNBC reported.
- Frontier said this month that a chat service "reduced negotiation" and dealt with more cases.
Frontier Airlines has shut down its customer support line in a bid to cut costs.
An airline spokesperson told CNBC it had cut its telephone service to help customers get "the information they need as expeditiously and efficiently as possible."
TravelNoire reported earlier this week that Frontier's service line wasn't working and gave callers an automated message directing them to other means of communication.
"At Frontier, we offer the lowest fares in the industry by operating our airline as efficiently as possible. We want our customers to be able to operate efficiently as well, which is why we make it easy to find what you need at Flyfrontier.com or on our mobile app," the automated message says.
The airline told TravelNoire the change was made last week. It follows plans announced at a November investors' presentation by Frontier executive Jack Filene.
"We are supporting higher labor rates in the voice channel, and we're limited to this one-to-one interaction," he said, adding that a chat agent could handle three queries at once.
"Think about the most sort of obscure question a customer might ask that would take a call center agent many, many minutes to research and find an answer to. The chatbot can answer that very quickly," he said.
The chat option would also "remove negotiation" from conversations, according to the presentation.
Frontier's move follows a summer of travel chaos which laid bare the lack of customer service offered by many airlines.
In June, an American Airlines passenger drove 45 minutes to Denver Airport after he was left on hold for nearly four hours.
An Air Canada passenger told Insider he made 76 calls in July in an attempt to track down his lost luggage, but only managed to get through to an agent three times.