Archive for the ‘sorry’ Category:
Forgiving Is Not Forgetting
Steven Frischling, aka: Fish, is a globe hopping airline emerging media consultant, one of our favorite bloggers, and a trusted advisor. He has an uncanny ability to identify relevant trends with equal ability for compiling supporting data into useful forms. In his recent post, Steve compiled a list for the percentage of twitter communications from airlines that contained the word “sorry” (or the equivalent in the language of the airline).
See the original post for details on how he compiled the following list:
So who is the most apologetic airline? Its not about how many times they say they are sorry, it is the percent of times they say they are sorry.
@British_Airways - 3,766 in 20,757 tweets, 18.14%
@QantasAirways - 2,185 in 14,595 tweets, 14.97%
@AmericanAir - 2,232 in 15,432 tweets, 14.46%
@SingaporeAir - 43 in 385 tweets, 11.16%
@SAS – 238 (in Norwegian 88) in 3,457 tweets, 9.43%
@SouthwestAir – 711 in 8,092 tweets, 8.78%
@Delta – 299 in 4,211 tweets, 7.10%
@AirCanada - 167 in 3,356 tweets, 4.97%
@USAirways – 80 in 2,149 tweets, 3.72%
@United - 66 in 1,897 tweets, 3.47%
@KLM – 826 in 30,563 tweets, 2.7%
@MAS – 69 in 3,740 tweets, 1.84%
@GulfAir – 32 in 1,918 tweets, 1.66%
@AirBaltic - 52 in 3,172 tweets, 1.63%
@RoyalBruneiAir – 17 in 1,348 tweets, 1.26%
Sorry by Surprise
In a recent conversation with Steve, he mentioned that airlines called him up to find out HOW he was able to compile this information. More important in our minds is, how can the airlines not know how to compile this information?
Apologies are very important because people do respond to a personal touch, so kudos to the airlines that have strong satisfaction outreach programs. On the other hand, apologies are an opportunity for a company to improve and management should take an opportunity to review “sorry” data.
The “insurance” approach.
Insurance is something that pays out after the failure occured. For example, AirBnB (a home sharing service) offers an insurance payout if your home is trashed by a renter from their network. Insurance utterly fails to compensate the victim for personal, physical, and emotional losses. Airlines most often compensate a traveler with a free ticket and nothing else – they should be looking for route cause or they may find their selves on one of Steve’s lists.
Social Flights responds with a very simple solution; our ride sharing service and community air service program.
By eliminating many of the breakdown points of the complex and overloaded hub and spoke system, Social flights can reduce the number of situations where an apology may be required. When a community can literally operate their own airline to their own schedule from their own airport, they eliminate delays due to traffic, parking, long lines, delays, connections, service fees, congestion, overnights, and a host of traveller harassment.
Go ahead and forgive, but don’t forget that there are options…