If the US presidential election of 2008 was the first occasion that social media played a major role in politics, then perhaps the ash drama of 2010 will be the most significant so far in travel.
The hyperbole that often accompanies social media may on this occasion be justified, it appears, with one senior airline executive who unfortunately did not want to be named saying services such as Twitter played a significant role in relaying information to passengers.
Shortly after the situation started unfolding in the early hours of Thursday 15 April the crisis management training of many travel companies was given a new dimension as airports across the UK and later the rest of Europe began shutting down and many passengers turned to the web for information.
Most of the major European airlines turned to Twitter to get their message out, perhaps not due to having hundreds of thousands of followers but because it became apparent very quickly that any official status from an airline was quickly retweeted by countless Twitter users.
[NB: The Volcanic ash cloud and European travel – live blog on Tnooz included official Twitter accounts from a string of airlines and other organisations]
The use of social media was not exclusive to Twitter. Airline fan pages on Facebook, so often used for the lighter side of travel (sharing photos, travel tips, etc) were also handed over to the crisis management teams.
As the crisis has moved from one of irritation initially on the part of passengers facing cancelled flights to a larger problem of stranded travellers around the world, the use of social media has changed.
Many airlines and airports are interacting directly with customers that have tried and failed to get assistance through call centres.
Meanwhile, running alongside the immediate customer service requirements have been other so-called social media and collaborative websites.
Sites such as RadarVirtuel and FlightRadar, perhaps once the preserve of aircraft enthusiasts and the curious, have given ordinary people an insight into the unfolding drama in a unique way, especially as air traffic was slowly cleared from the skies across Europe on Friday 16, with a real-time view of flight operations across the continent.
There was also the live webcam of the dreaded volcano in Iceland (admittedly a service which has been sporadic given the expected levels of web traffic heading its way).
There will be those, of course, who suggest that social media itself has fuelled this latest round of self-congratulation and allowing the ability to navel-gaze once again.
But, conversely, there are also countless others that have praised the airlines, airports, authorities and other organisations for simply using what has been another communication channel to reach confused customers.
I’m Daniele of RoadSharing Team, we created Roadsharing.com in 2008 to offer a free carpooling service that now is one of the most used in Europe.
In the last days, seeing many travellers stucked in the ariports around Europe we decided to put our website at theri service in order to help them find their way home.
We modified our twitter notification system to put in evidence user lift requests using the tags #getmehome and #roadsharing.
The twitter community immediatly adopt the convention and the lifts offers/requests had a boom.
We put roadsharing.com in the service of people stucked and in this way each offer/request is immediatly post on twitter and all the travellers are able to check it directly from their mobile devices (phone, netbopok, ipad ecc) in other words we bring the lift offers directly to the travellers using twitter.
Usually roadsharing.com has 2.500 – 3.500 unique visitors each day searchin and offering lifts.
Now we registered a 700% increase in traffic ( 17.000 unique visitors ) in a few hours and the best thing is that we saw many users being able to get in touch with each other to arrange a car shared trip to get home.
The rides are longer and usually from different countries ( FR -> IT, ES -> FR, ES ->DE …) the map attached shows the rides added in the last hours al around Europe the full list is not available on map due to “weight”
Our service is completely free and the first aim is to reduce pollution and promote an alternative mobility, it’s a non profit project.
We are happy to see that in this harsh situation RoadSharing.com was of some help to the travelling community.
At the moment we don’t have a “story” because we are still “running” peraph after we are going to interview our users for feedbacks and soty.
Do not esitate to contact us should you need more infos.
If you write an article please could you send us a copy or a link for our press room.
Best regards
It demonstrates also the weakness of everything: Airline Call centers and websites overloaded despite or because of advice to call the call center or check out the websites. Luggage departments in disarray. Governments and Unions like the European being in weekend mode and letting the dramas unfold or coming to a half standstill because ministers are elsewhere. And so on and so forth…not to forget the question”waht can our Airforces do in such situations???”
Definintely a lot of self congratulation and navel gazing amongst the social media set, but not this time. Twitter as a corporate driven customer service model is not scalable, but Twitter has been excellent during this crisis when phone lines are jammed and consumers/passengers share information amongst each other. In an environment with a lot of confusion and fast breaking updates (eg. an airport being closed, or who had their hotel paid by which airline and how) then you’d be hard pressed to find a more effective means of getting information widely distributed in a short space of time.
The reason twitter was so useful is that govts, airlines and other travel companies communication was ineffective, erroneous. They are so understaffed and unagile that you need to wait hours to get to a call center rep and the airports are deserted. I work for the airline industry and have the utmost respect for them in many ways, but as far as crisis management, they are awful! It’s too easy for any business or project to stay on track when all is going well – you see the real winners in life, coping and adjusting, when things go wrong. The airlines stood back and watched and whined about losing money… and did not adapt – no means to get more call center staff, no means to help travellers at the airports, no change in capcity on the routes that were running, poor information and decision making.
Sorry, but it is easy for an individual, business, project to get ahead in life when all is well… REAL SERVICE AND REAL WINERS COME THROUGH WHEN TIMES GET ROUGH! I’m reassured by the human spirit, that thanks to Twitter, did get helpful information out there!! No technology will ever be a substitue for compassion, creativity and common sense!