Slashdot Mirror
Angry Customer Buys Promoted Tweets To Bash British Airways
An anonymous reader writes "After the airline lost his father's luggage (and presumably was less than helpful in resolving the issue), one man decided to use Twitter's self-serve ad platform to issue a warning to fellow travelers in the New York and UK markets. The tweets have gotten the attention not only of media outlets, but also of fellow airlines. A JetBlue executive even retweeted it. While companies use the platform to target customers, it's interesting to see it being turned around."
Libel lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
because of this one tweet. it opened my mind to how evil this company is burning customers' luggage for the fun of it
thank you thank you thank you
All marketing is like that. Because the cost is a bit lower (though I imagine still not "cheap" -- for some values of the word "cheap"), and "digital" is in front, it makes it news... like anything else in the last few decades, I suppose....
Think about this, BA did not respond to this paid & highly public tweet until 4 hours later. If they are that bad at dealing with publicity, I imagine their customer service on a daily (semi-private) basis must be 10 times worse.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Slashdotted already, must be a record
"You may NOT tweet or retweet bad reviews about products from our premium advertisers."
But I wouldn't expect them to keep this power. Just like retail stores rid themselves of picketers by building shopping malls (you can't picket on private property, so pickets can only be at the street entrance to the mall property which severely hampers their effect on individual stores). No doubt they'll figure some way to take the wind out of these sails. Freedom of speech only belongs to those with money...
Just delayed.
Billboards work better- I look at them sometimes.
http://simpliflying.com/2013/promoted-tweet-against-british-airways-airline-customer-service/
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
They might lose luggage more if it results in others paying to promote their brand name! Folks down the road won't remember why BA is in the forefront of their subconscious when they go to purchase tickets... Smart of Jet Blue to try to get in on the attention too.
This is one of the big problems with trying to warn folks off bad service, you really need to promote every company save the one you aren't a fan of or it just ends up good for them in the long run.
That's not an anal probe, it's some corporate PR wonk's arm.
It is fucking downright dogshit in the mouth awful. Ryanair lost my business forever and ever. Ryanair 's customer service is horrendous + extra charges.
In my current job, I have to deal with airline complaints.
Repeat after me: All airlines suck!
Like all cable TV companies.
The airlines KNOW that they can treat you like shit and get away with it. Years, an airline CEO got a customer's complaint. He basically said, oh well, they'll be back because the only thing the flying public cares about is low fares. He accidentally hit 'Reply All'. The press got it and called him on it and he just said, "Yep, I said it. So what?"
It's been a while so it's been buried by millions of asshole SEOs crap.
so, this will make a small splash, BA will go on fine, and this poor bastard will at best get a voucher on BA.
Have a nice day! (Airline speak for Fuck off!)
Airlines have been handling luggage for a very long time, you would think they would have this figured out by now.
Anecdote: I flew Delta quite a bit some years ago and lived about 2 hours/90 miles away from the airport. They would routinely misplace my luggage (never lost it, thankfully) and they had to have somebody drive my bag to my house when they found it. This happened a dozen times. It must have cost them about the price of my ticket for each delivery.
I can only assume that it was because of the luggage missing connecting flights, but most of the time I had at least an hour layover. It just seems like they could make this work
They still got his money.
Unsatisfied customers tell 3,000. Well known in retail. Never more relevant.
I live in the US, but travel overseas 3+ times a year. My last trip, there was a small BA segment from Johannesburg to Cape Town.
The aircraft was well-used and about 20% full. There wasn't much organization around boarding - no matter with a mostly empty plane. The equipment was an old Airbus .... with extremely well-worn leather. The BA "blue" that I expected just wasn't there. It was faded.
A simple drink and snack service was handled like they were passing peanuts down the line at a Mets game and I was on the aisle. I wasn't looked at in the eye, no smiles and no excess words beyond what was mandatory. Perhaps a cultural thing for the African crew - I don't know. I felt like an inconvenience.
NO customer should ever feel like an inconvenience.
Don't get me wrong, KLM, Delta, Italian Air, American, United, Frontier ... can all suck. I've also had fairly nice flights on each of them. KLM made me feel special on my last trip out - at the end of the 8 hr flight, they handed me a survey. I was getting special treatment compared to other people around me ... trying to get good marks on the survey, I suppose. On the way back, I got hassled by the TSA-chick in AMS over refusing to go through their millimeter wave system. I'm usually asked "why" once. She asked 4 times and it felt like an interogation. "Because I don't want to" was my only answer, so she didn't like it. I've never gone through the newer x-ray or millimeter wave machines - NOT ONCE. I don't need to get cancer any sooner than my father did.
The Korean Air team handled everything with a purpose after we boarded and got out of the USA. In the USA, too many Americans handling checkin and boarding - though I did get singled out and bumped to the front of the line initial check-in line for some unknown reason. In Seoul, changing planes was like clock work - professional, pleasant, efficient. A $4 shower was great too. I love their boarding by zones and that Korean and Japanese people tend to follow instructions and lined up for their zones correctly. I'd like to see that in China, India or Nepal!
I haven't had any lost luggage since the mid-1980s. Scary - I'm passed due now. Going overseas, I tend to have 3-4 segments each way (37 hrs of travel can be tough), so there has been lots of opportunity to lose it. Just lucky I guess.
So, all in all, I don't dislike BA, but I don't plan to go out of my way to fly them either. They missed an opportunity.
While flights are virtually 24/7, PR/ marketing/ and advertising firms tend to be outsourced to few regions around the world. To be fair, I'd expect BA to have an agency or reps in the US - primarily in NYC, the hub of corporate PR and advertisement.
I have not seen any advertisements on Twitter. I even turned off ad-block plus. Twitter has an self-serve ad platform? I never knew that.
"Remember: every member of your 'target audience' also owns a broadcasting station. These 'targets' can shoot back."
-- Michael Rathbun to advertisers, in n.a.n-a.e
The "lost" bag was found and is due to be delivered... Does this mean that they didn't start looking for it until the Tweet showed up?
Here's a good one. Delta at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta allowed me to take my desktop PC as a carry on (confirmed by phone and at airport) to Venezuela. On the way back home I was informed despite significant protest that I was not allowed to carry it on. They began shrouding it in plastic wrap, being kind enough to give it a little extra before it got tossed in with the rest of the luggage. My mouth was an O of horror as you can imagine.
When I picked up my desktop from the luggage belt in Atlanta it sounded like a piñata. I removed the side panel and--I kid you not--the RAM, video card and FUCKING HARD DRIVE were completely unseated. I can't imagine the physics that resulted in the hard drive coming out.
So yeah, airline baggage handling is awesome. Oh, and the computer still worked after reassembly.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
In Britain? Absolutely.
No, truth is an effective defence against libel. The difference is that the onus is on the person making the statement to prove that what they wrote is true rather than the person bringing the court case. This can cause problems if you were, for example, commenting that chiropractice pushes bogus treatments because it is hard to prove a negative. Fortunately that case was won and things have improved somewhat since then.
Actually, many of the hotels have wised up to this practice, deciding there's a profit opportunity in it for them too.
I work for a place that often helps put on shows or presentations in various parts of the country, so we tend to ship out big "show kits" full of gear, just before flying to the destination. Then the show kit can be picked up at the hotel lobby when it's ready, saving a lot of hassle lugging it through an airport and into a taxi or rental car or what-mot.
Unfortunately, the hotels tend to tack on $75 or so per item "handling" or "storage" charges, just for accepting the delivery signature for the kit and keeping it behind the desk for you.
So no, it's doubtful this practice will save you much money. Everyone wants a cut of the money when you're traveling.
Yeah! And they don't even use gloves! At least my Politicians have the decency to do so.
But I'm pretty sure you could start a fire on the internet without having to pay a company for gasoline. If we're at the point now where a snarky comment in the right forum doesn't explode into 2/3rds of the planet's population judging your business, well, there's something wrong with the internet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I can imagine reddit threads where members crowdfund promoted tweets against the most despised companies, such as cable and telco providers.
What you fail to understand is we are in a new era of corporate 'customer care' where they literally don't give a shit. They hired some consultants, commissioned a study, talked to their marketing people and determined the the old adage that it costs more to get new customers than it does to retain their existing ones is nonsense. It's cheaper to treat all your customers like shit, tell them all to fuck the fuck off and behind them are sufficient numbers of new people waiting to experience their product and/or service.
They don't give a shit. And they have the math to back it up. Not just airlines - but the traditional companies that offer near-Auschwitz levels of customer satisfaction: cable companies, phone companies, car rental firms, home service companies, dry cleaners, supermarkets, internet providers, internet phone, TV on demand, car dealerships......all of them. If you're a customer today and tomorrow they decide it's cheaper to cut off your service for no reason, mess up your repair or more typically delay it for weeks for no clear reason then that's what they will do.
Lose your luggage? Airlines aren't in the luggage or transport business they're in the fees and fines business. They're in the business of shaving fractions of a penny off the cost of something because what are you going to do? Walk? What are you going to do? Complain? What good will that do?
It's a massive race to the bottom for everyone and the big joke is that there's no bottom at all. They discovered that not being in business makes more money than anything else. Decades from now business schools will be studying the NYNEX strike of 1989 and see it as the gospel of the ages, a holy grail of business. When NYNEX workers went on strike in 1989 the company made MORE money than ever. Management discovered that not paying their workforce and continuing to send out bills while service fell off the cliff had no repercussions, no downside, and more importantly, no one, no state or regulatory agency would ever pressure them to improve once the strike ended so it just continued 'offering' worsening levels of non-service until the company we bought up in the AT&T recreation of the 1990's.
So complain all you like, tweet your anger, shake your fist at a distant and indifferent god. They don't give a fuck.
In some airport It is not the airline which take the luggage to the flight, or in the case of a connecting flight, take the baggage from one flight to put in the others. it is actually the airport and in some case it is a fully automated system with rails and stuff. Airline sometimes deserve to get flak for stuff they do, but losing baggage, I got the feeling with the years that actually is done by airport personal, not the airline personal.
We recently flew to London from the US on BA. We were less than pleased with our experience. The on-board entertainment system worked only for some seats; we got to watch where the airplane was on its path all the way to London. My wife's seat would not hold into the upright position, and the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her was falling off and onto her feet. BA employees did nothing. The plane was full, but there were seats in business class. Were I the airline I would have offered to upgrade. Our attempts to contact BA about this experience have gone completely unanswered.
I'm glad someone blasted them publicly.
At least you have a choice. I had pretty much the same conversation with IT support at work about UAC and my admin privileges.
Out of nowhere I was forced to enter my network, username, password, etc... for every admin action I took.
First two people I talked to swore up and down it had always been like that, forever.
I was like, it wasn't like this a week ago, a month ago, or ever, do you think I am making things ups?
Finally I got a guy who said that I was on the wrong list, and "fixed" it.
Until it immediately started happening again.
If I was doing a single thing it is annoying. If I am doing repetitive admin privileges type of work, say 40 times, I have to enter 130 pieces of information, not including any typos that might drive me to the edge of violence.
In the end as it turns out Corporate Security made/changed a policy basically saying that UAC had to be on the most severe setting for everyone. Yes you can go in with admin access and change the UAC settings, but they instantly revert when you login again.
Final response was, not our problem, take it up with corporate security, if you know you are doing a lot of repetitive stuff, temporarily change your UAC settings. One hand not knowing what the other is doing really. Don't have much choice but to put up with it, just takes longer and is more frustrating to do certain tasks. However like you, initially they swore up and down that it was always like that forever and that I must be making things up! Never mind it was a security policy change from the week before that they were either clueless about or were trying to downplay....
Hmmmm, I simply assumed that all Slashdot responses were simply in the context of the USA.