Angry Customer Buys Promoted Tweets To Bash British Airways 286
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."
Re:4 hours to respond (Score:4, Interesting)
I assume for something so odd and unexpected it took them a bit to properly prepare their response.
Marketing guy would have to take it to his Mgmt and him to his, etc... then it'd have to debate on how to respond then it' have to be passed back down the chain and done. Last thing you want is for it to go south and you be THAT GUY that messed it up. Name of the game is covering your ass, especially on high publicized portional PR nightmares.
Re:Incoming (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
You would think they'd have this down by now (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:now i will never fly BA (Score:4, Interesting)
Presumably you are talking about your experience in the US, because that kind of shit would never be allowed in the EU. You have a right to food, accommodation and compensation. I don't know why US consumers put up with being treated that way.