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."

Comments

Re:Incoming

[gstoddart]

That doesn't mean that some companies aren't so egregiously bad at customer service that you wouldn't walk away from doing business with them.

In my experience, United Airlines is shit, don't care if they're shit, will tell you point blank you shouldn't expect anything but shit, and would you like some more shit?

When a company ignores you, blows you off, or does absolutely nothing about your complaints, I think something like this is brilliant.

Sending a very public "fuck you" is sometimes the only recourse you have for companies who have lousy service. If they're going to act like "too bad, we don't care" -- pointing that out for all to see isn't such a bad idea.

I've never dealt with BA, but I've certainly encountered companies whose customer service is so terrible as to make you think they're doing it on purpose. And those companies deserve a little public shaming sometimes.

Re:Incoming

[MightyYar]

In the early 2000s I had a two Sprint phones on a family plan. For a year, I checked our usage almost daily on their website. One day, it stopped working. The first-line idiot said that it still worked the same way it did when he was hired 6 months ago. I asked him whether he thought I was crazy and he said, "Well, I guess I don't know." I spoke to his manager - same line: you have never been able to do this from our website. Either guy could have at least pretended to believe me, but that's customer service gone right and they were all about getting it wrong. How hard could a bug report be? I cancelled my service on the spot.

Had I been able to buy a Tweet at the time, I might have. Complete incompetence.