Airlines bad customer service in disguise

by TC on 24/11/09 at 10:05 am

We’ve all heard of twitter. We know what it can do for a company, let alone the entertainment part that we all enjoy when we update our personal posts.

One good example of an airline company using twitter is American Airlines. Its young, dynamic and rather open online approach is amazing, coming from a company who was just in the newspapers in an affray about firing its employee for his transparency. As you might recall we are talking about the situation created by Dusting Curtis, when he decided to complain to the company about their poor website. Mr. X, former employee wrote back to him and then allegedly got fired for this. So what is the airline afraid of so much to forget that people need to see the kitchen, before they start eating your food? After all, I’m guessing not all questions on twitter are about the company’s flights and schedules.

Next, I could go on with some recent examples of obvious bad customer service, in order to refresh your memory. The most popular one is for sure United Airlines versus singer/songwriter Dave Carroll. The latter tried to convince the company to pay him $1200 for damages to his guitar. Even though the owner was quick to complain and had witness supporting him, justice seemed not to be on his side. After eight months the artist desperately recorded a song called “United Breaks Guitars” and posted the video on YouTube.

What happened next? The story was soon called one of “the best online reputation attack” since the original video is still gathering views worldwide and, most importantly, made the company realize that it was mistaking and should have solved the problem before.

Also do you have anything bad to say about Ryanair? Of course they are low cost, but the real question is how low are they? Going way back, Ryanair shocked its customers at the beginning of 2009 when not only officials admitted that one employee was harassing and verbally abusing a person on his blog, but continued to add the list of insults. It may be just me, but I find it hard to imagine how I can trust in someone that has the impression of being professional and still testifies this:

Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again….Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

It’s quite clear that Ryanair doesn’t have much time for social media and that it doesn’t really understand how free the internet really works. Maybe next time, when purchasing a ticket, we should try and see beyond the nice and smiling faces that welcome us aboard.

If you are a victim of some sort of airline abuse or you think an airline company did something terrible wrong to you, feel free to comment here and tell us all about.

Airline Post