The Christmas time meltdown of the air transport system in the East Coast of the US was driven by the coldest weather in over 60 years.
It caps a series of unique weather/Act of God events that have plagued air travel in 2010.
While both the airlines and the airports have been roundly denounced as being instruments of the devil as far as media and customer advocacy groups are concerned, there is a silver lining in that the airlines have found better and more appropriate ways to interact with their customers in real time.
To this end, Twitter seems to have been a solid case of how this can work.
One airline, which was one of the most dramatically affected this week, deployed an unproven and completely different way of doing things. That airline was Delta.
The Delta Assist Tweet Team – yes, we can identify the nine team members: WinstonvG ^WG, Brigitte H ^BH, Joseph H ^JH, Theresa H ^TH, Jerry F ^JF, Jonathan D ^JD, Angela J ^AJ, Lashonda H ^LH and Erica C ^EC – should now be regarded as Twitter celebs for their efforts.
And they did not go unnoticed. The Grey Lady herself wrote a great story which was picked up by other newspapers around the country.
And as Wall Street Journal columnist Scott McCartney wrote in his annual review from the middle seat:
“… blizzard on the East Coast – with 7,000 canceled flights – showed our air-travel system can be exceedingly unreliable in an age when technology makes so much of our daily routine dependable.”
With the airlines having cut back on customer service personnel, this meltdown should have been a customer service nightmare of biblical proportions, but we have seen that both the airports and the airlines have improved how they communicate.
That communication is helping to alleviate at least some of the passenger misery.
The change in process and use of social media tools is not confined to airlines. In 2010, airports especially in Europe learned at the School of Real Time Hard Knocks how bad things can be and what to do about it.
One of the many sung heroes of the ash cloud crisis was the Twitter team at Eurocontrol (although some may argue the bosses were also to blame).
Similarly one of the worst affected airports was London Heathrow, but its tweeting did much to keep the public informed. LHR did more than a credible job of using Twitter to get the message out.
I used to believe that Twitter would not scale for large problems, but it can and really does work in these types of situation. The emergence of direct tweeting, and the public nature of it, is helping a lot of people in real time deal with these types of crisis.
More power to the teams who made this all possible.
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For me, avg initial response time from DL twitter cust serve team in 2010 was 93 minutes. Then, to get them to help you it was required to follow DL which, of course, created much DL travel deal spam. I tried getting help from DL, via twitter, on 8 different occasions in 2010. Every time it was easier and faster to call their 800#. I count this as a “fail”. You?
British Airways and BMI were using twitter well and with much faster response times. Eurocontrol were outstanding. BA and BD also helped out during the ash cloud, by the way. Nonetheless, nice to know that the Americans – Delta – are catching up with Europe though. They generally do, I suppose… eventually.
Heathrow Airport were useless. Rather like those overhead information boards on motorways, that, when you are in a jam, tell you you are in a jam. What Heathrow Airport didn’t do was their job, which is to keep the runways etc operating. Handing out blankets is not what they are paid to do. They are paid to keep the thing functioning. Ash cloud was not the fault of LHR but snow, third time around, was a definite #fail.
Re : Twitter scalability.
I used to think the same but I came to the conclusion that scalabilty issues are not about the tool but the process (customer service) it supports. The tool scale but organizational bandiwidth won’t is nothing is done to align it with the new social channel
http://www.duperrin.com/english/2010/12/27/customer-service-avoid-being-the-victim-of-you-social-media-success/
During the bad weather (lots of snow in Europe), KLM (Holland) used Twitter to stay in contact with their passengers. Passengers could even use Twitter to re-book their flights.
In November, KLM used Twitter to surprise their passengers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHWAE8GDEk