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Gulliver

Flying in the snowpocalypse

Six ways airlines could communicate better

Dec 29th 2010, 17:31 by G.L. | NEW YORK

AS A relatively lucky travel victim of the recent American snowstorms (only 48 hours late, my flights ran on time when they weren't cancelled, I was able to stay at friends' places both nights, and I wasn't stuck on a runway for seven hours like one of my colleagues), my conclusion is that the airlines could have saved themselves an enormous amount of ill-will if they only communicated better.

After all, this was, pardon the cliché, a perfect storm: a once-in-a-decade snowfall, at one of the busiest times of the year, and with airline load factors (the proportion of seats filled, a measure of an airline's efficiency) running at record levels. Under those circumstances, having thousands of passengers stranded is inevitable. But explaining to them what's going on is crucial. Based on my own experience and those of other people I spoke to, the airlines didn't do it very well. Here are some pointers for an airline wanting to improve its image during a weather crisis.

1. Let passengers know in advance. United Airlines emailed me 24 hours before my flight from Los Angeles to New York to tell me to check in online. Why couldn't it email me to tell me the flight had been cancelled? I found out only because I did go online early to check in, something I frequently don't manage to do. Moreover, once I did, there was no information anywhere on the United website about the reason for the cancellation. This was on December 25th, a full day before the snow hit the east coast; I knew snow was forecast, but had no idea it would lead to hundreds of pre-emptive cancellations.

2. Make sure your technology is resilient. I was given the option to rebook my own flight online. But the rebooking system was broken. At least one other airline, Continental, had similar problems. Whoever manages these firms' websites should get a rap on the knuckles at the very least. Broken websites means angry customers flooding phone lines. Which leads to the next problem.

3. Make sure you have emergency phone support. For several hours, anyone calling Delta's phone line got a message saying something like "Due to the extreme weather conditions, we cannot answer your call at this time". I at least was told my waiting time to speak to someone at United would be 60 minutes, but it was the next day before I was in a position—somewhere quiet, no appointments, phone sufficiently charged—to spend 60 minutes waiting.

4. Implement automated rebooking. If I had got an email telling me not only that my flight was cancelled but that I was already booked on another one, I might still have tried to change it—but knowing that at least I had a flight, I might just as well have shrugged and left it at that. Rebooking passengers automatically, while leaving them the option to change the booking themselves, would reduce the anger and the load on phone lines quite a bit.

5. Put up an FAQ. Passengers waiting in lines do two things: if they have smartphones they browse the web incessantly, and when they're bored with that they start talking to each other. What they say tends to be grumpy rhetorical questions to which they couldn't find the answers online. "Why did they cancel the flight before they even knew how much it would snow?" "La Guardia's open now, so how come the flight's still cancelled?" "Why have they got no seats available until Thursday if my friend on Airline X got one for tomorrow?" "How come they can rebook me but they can't reroute my baggage?" There are good answers to a lot of these; for instance, a flight may stay cancelled even if its destination airport has reopened because the disruptions mean crews and pilots aren't where they need to be. Every airline should have a bad-weather FAQ posted at the top of its website's homepage, and particularly on the mobile web version.

6. Use social media better. I did an analysis of some of the main airlines' use of Twitter over the past four days. Received wisdom says there should be a correlation between how well a firm uses Twitter—both the number of tweets and the proportion of @-replies (responses to individuals)—and how many followers it has. To account for the wide variation in airline sizes, I used "followers per passenger" rather than absolute number of followers. For this four-day period, at least, the correlation looks weak, but the stellar performance of JetBlue suggests that making a real effort, rather than a half-hearted one, will reap rewards:

Airline followers per passenger |  first tweet about storms |  no. of tweets since |  @-replies
Delta 0.016 Dec 23 12:24 40 48%
US Airways 0.024 Dec 25 14:10 12 0%
American 0.026 Dec 26 13:07 19 84%
United 0.040 Dec 27 09:40 11 55%
Continental 0.043 Dec 25 22:27 53 34%
Southwest 0.129 Dec 26 09:49 22 82%
JetBlue 1.001 Dec 24 14:31 126 94%

Sources: Twitter, Bureau of Transportation Statistics

At any rate, for me as a Twitter user, the fact that United took a full day after the storm hit to even acknowledge on Twitter that there were problems definitely gave me the feeling that it wasn't on the ball. Even if it didn't take the trouble to reply to passengers, a few more updates and links to an FAQ would have made us all feel better informed and less likely to swamp the phone lines.

In summary, the more information an airline makes available up-front, the less likely it is to be overloaded by angry phone calls and bad-mouthed by passengers for weeks aftewards. It should be obvious, guys, really.

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hedgefundguy wrote:
Dec 29th 2010 6:42 GMT

Sounds like more costs to me.
Add it to the ticket prices.

BTW.. how far in advance should the airlines play "the Amazing Kreskin"?

Remember, one has to be at the airport at least 1 hour before flight time. Toss in 30 min to 1 hour travel to the airport for your average flier, and double that for bad weather.

Also, please note, not everyone can afford a $70/month cell phone, nor do they work for a company that gives the things to thier employees.

I might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even I notice that in the winter time there are fewer birds flying.

Also, the colder or snowier it gets, the fewer amount of birds I see flying.

It is interesting to note that people will stand for hours in a line in freezing cold weather to get that "Black Friday" deal.

Perhaps a mandatory penalty-free opt out period?
A person whose flight hasn't departed after 2 hours of the flight time can opt out and not be penalized, get a full refund in cash.

Regards

Dec 29th 2010 7:50 GMT

hedgefundguy,

While I appreciate your point about the expense of data plans...your handle hear is hedgefundguy, so the complaint seems a bit disingenuous.

That being said, I can't stand twitter and I see no reason to volunteer for airlines to lob ads at me all year. Not much chance of my "friending" an airline either. Social media ceases to be social when you're referring to interactions between giant coporations and their consumers. That, if I am not mistaken, is pretty much regular media.

steven_a wrote:
Dec 29th 2010 8:34 GMT

The airlines do automatically rebook their high-level frequent flyer customers when they have flight cancellations. I have enjoyed this privilege during my former high-travel days. They could easily expand this to more customers.

bbulkow wrote:
Dec 29th 2010 8:52 GMT

Sirs, I believe you are unjustifiably harsh on the phone response times for some airlines.

You mention that Delta's phone line was busy "for several hours". Continental has been down (unable to queue a call) for 3 days. I have tried calling them well over 100 times, and have been queued exactly once - but didn't get through to a person before my battery ran out. Orbitz was unable to queue a call for about 10 hours. When I did get through to Orbitz (after then waiting nearly 2 hours, 9 hours into my attempt to rebook), they tried calling Continental on the special travel-agents-only line and failed.

Perhaps Delta is one of the best responders, and worked overtime getting their phones back up and operational as quickly as they did. Perhaps Continental was very, very bad and Delta was only average. You haven't done enough research to know. I would suggest, in the future, that you do enough research to tell the difference between poor performance and excellent performance before tarring a company by name.

A moment of shoddy professionalism is especially embarrassing in an article accusing other companies of shoddy professionalism.

TMac2000 wrote:
Dec 29th 2010 10:23 GMT

One word. Respect

LaoHu23 wrote:
Dec 30th 2010 12:51 GMT

On your proposal 1 there are airlines which make extensive use of this, fortunately the ones I use.
Air France website carries advance warning of strikes, weather and other impediments!
Turkish Airlines posts flight cancellations on it's website and phones passengers telling them about rebookings.
Perhaps you try these next time!

daithesong wrote:
Dec 30th 2010 4:27 GMT

Your comments are all great. But to sum up: tell passengers the truth and tell them soon. There is nothing more infuriating than being stonewalled, delayed, moved from pillar to post, and so on, when some simple honesty would cut it all short. example: "We don't have a crew for the flight and we don't expect to for 18 hours. We're sorry." bad example: "Delayed, please check back in 60 minutes." (repeated 18 times).

Dec 30th 2010 8:20 GMT

This service debacle is more evidence that US domestic airlines need more competition. If the US were to permit foreign airlines to carry passengers on domestic routes, the US majors would have no choice but to improve their quality of in-flight service. I am surprised that the traveling public is not pushing for this simple change to occur.

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