Take it personally. When people are stuck on board a plane for eight hours with no clean toilets, th

It could have been worse. cheap airline tickets to the philippines I could ve been stranded on the runway for eight hours . Instead, I was stuck at the JetBlue terminal for 12 hours last Thursday before cheap airline tickets to the philippines finding out my flight was cancelled. [1]
Put all your soldiers on the front lines. Jet Blue s corporate offices are located near JFK so they brought in a bunch of people who normally work there to help out at the terminal. They wore Jet Blue vests and/or badges and wandered around the terminal answering questions, directing customers, and listening cheap airline tickets to the philippines to complaints. Granted, a lot of these people didn t know much more than the passengers cheap airline tickets to the philippines but, hey, at least they were there. A lot of customers just wanted to vent and know someone was listening. You need boots on the ground to do the little things. I saw one rep ask an irate customer for a business card so he could follow up with him later. A small step, but it just might save a customer.
Be the guy with the megaphone. The PA system by the gates was pitiful. The volume was feeble and you could barely make out the thin announcements (which were similar to the unintelligible cheap airline tickets to the philippines conductor announcements on the NYC subways). People were desperate to know what was going on. Enter megaphone man. Rumor was that he actually worked as legal counsel to JetBlue. He went to each gate with a megaphone and updated cheap airline tickets to the philippines all the passengers with the latest info. Then he d walk toward the rear of that gate and repeat the info again for those who hadn t heard the first time. It wasn t always good news. But at least an actual person was there , communicating something clearly.
Have an operator reserve force. A lot of the JetBlue reps on the scene encouraged passengers to call (800) Jet-Blue for more info. The problem was the phone lines were so jampacked there was no way to get through. This forced already irate customers to wait in lines for hours in order to find out information that easily could have been shared over the phone. The result: Anger builds and the people onsite cheap airline tickets to the philippines had to deal with it.
Take it personally. When people are stuck on board a plane for eight hours with no clean toilets, they take it personally. And when your company promise is to bring humanity back to air travel, you better take it personally too.
Mr. Neeleman said he would enact what he called a customer bill of rights that would financially penalize JetBlue — and reward cheap airline tickets to the philippines passengers — for any repeat of the current upheaval. He said he would propose a plan to pay customers, after some amount of time, by the hour for being stranded on a plane He says knows he has to deliver. “I can flap my lips all I want,” he said. “Talk is cheap. Watch us.”
Your site is a PR weapon. Neeleman s emotional response was nowhere to be found at JetBlue.com though. The latest JetBlue news at the site is the addition of 3 blind moose Merlot and Chardonnay to flights. Hmm, is that really the big JetBlue news right now? And the last entry at the CEO s blog at the site has the title 2007 Takes Off in the Right Direction.
Granted, there s a link that says Operational Interruptions in the site s header but it only takes you to a bunch of sterile, boilerplate text (e.g, JetBlue continues to experience cancellations and delays as a result of Wednesday s ice storm in the Northeast. Please check the status of your flight online before proceeding to the airport. )
The site needs to become the online version of the guy with the megaphone. There should be a letter from the CEO . There should be an apology. There should be details about changes that are going to happen to prevent this from occurring again. If they can t easily make changes to the current site, they should set up a special crisis site to deal specifically cheap airline tickets to the philippines with this debacle. As it is now, the company s online presence seems disconnected from reality.
[1] Fyi, here s the gritty details of my day at JFK (others had it worse): There was a big storm on Wednesday. But by Thursday things had cleared up. I had a 1:15pm flight to Chicago. I checked online and the site said the flight had been delayed until 2:15pm. So I arrived at the airport at 1pm. I checked in and the rep told me my flight had been cancelled and I was now flying standby cheap airline tickets to the philippines on the 8pm flight. He took my bag and checked it in. He said if I had any questions, to ask at Special Services check-in. I went there and waited in line for over an hour. They told me that the 8pm flight wouldn t actually leave until 11:45pm. cheap airline tickets to the philippines And even then there would only be a 50-50 chance that I would get onto that flight. There were no other flights available until Monday. cheap airline tickets to the philippines I decided to wait it out and take my chances. I stuck around the airport and then, at around 10:30pm, they told us the flight had been cancelled. We had to reschedule by waiting in another huge line or calling an 800 number. The 800 number cheap airline tickets to the philippines was jammed though and it was impossible to get through. I decided to worry about it later. Now I had to get my bag back. This was another two hour wait. No one knew where the bags would come out or when they would come out. (But they did know that the bags could not be delivered.) Everyone was frazzled. The baggage handlers looked like they had just emerged from a war zone. Finally, at about 12:45am, the bags came out. I headed home. On the way, I tried calling the 800 number again and got put on hold. While on hold, there was a recurring message that said, JetBlue isn t the only way to fly but it ought to be.
Here is a fine example of having (previously) set in place the ability to send SMS text messages to your customers. I know American Airlines and probably most of the others have some sort of email notifications in place to warn customers cheap airline tickets to the philippines of changes in flight status, cheap airline tickets to the philippines etc.
In this type of scenario, if [airline] had the mechanism in place to allow the passengers to input their cell numbers in their online profile at the airline web site, and then select any of a number of preferences for types of communications, frequency, and delivery channel(s) preferred, they could have easily circumvented a lot of those incomplete phone connections.
James: I had a flight from San Francisco to Chicago canceled two weeks ago and received a call from an American Airlines rep several hours before I even planed to head to the airport. I had to wait an additional 6 hours, but it sure beats the problems people had with Jet Blue. (I m also surprised Orbitz didn t send a txt message cheap airline tickets to the philippines or call me. They usually take care of that when there is a problem).
If the site fails to become the version of the guy with the megaphone, the inmates will create their own. I remember vividly the (many) horror stories of United and the subsequent launch of www.untied.com which I see is still going strong.
Other airlines don t have these kinds of problems. In 2004 my fiance cheap airline tickets to the philippines and I flew to Connecticut to get married. This was when all that JetBlue luggage went into a black hole in Philly. All our luggage including her wedding dress went to Spain. (It finally came back three days later, barely in time for the wedding.) No explanation was ever made as to why this happened, why thousands of passengers had their luggage vanish.
American had people sitting on runways in Texas for at least 5 hours that was in the news a week or two before it happened to JetBlue. I got stuck on a United flight from Seattle to Chicago but was diverted to Indiana for a few hours. That ~4 hour flight turned into 9 hours of hell.
To pile on Bob a bit, Delta is notorious for over booking flights and notifying no one. Like the issue will fix itself at the gate. Leaving the gate staff with 50 angry customers all bumped to the next available flights to (insert city) which are at or close to capacity. cheap airline tickets to the philippines But, sometimes my baggage will make the original flight. That s always fun.
I propose anybody who wants smooth sailing gives segment intending a try. Segment intending is where you set forth your intentions for whatever you are about to experience before you immerse yourself in the experience. Seeing things as done before you do them pre-paves the way for things to work out as you would like them to -sound hoky? I suggest cheap airline tickets to the philippines you give it a try!
I would amend your section Put all your soldiers on the front lines. cheap airline tickets to the philippines It s fine that JetBlue sent these people out but I don t want just to know someone was listening, the company rep needs to know how to solve the problem. Clearly, this wasn t done.
Steve, cheap airline tickets to the philippines while I agree with you in general (the power of visualization is well known in sports, music, and many other fields), I doubt that hundreds of airline passengers setting forth their intentions would have miraculously sorted out the JetBlue delays.
I actually think Jet Blue handled cheap airline tickets to the philippines this pretty well, all things cheap airline tickets to the philippines considered. Even if their people on the ground couldn t help anyone, at least they were there to keep people informed, which definitely counts for something.
Also, I know I shouldn t, but I actually believe their CEO when he talks about pushing changes down the pipe to prevent this from happening again. I mean, Jet Blue hasn t been around that long, this is probably the organization s first experience with crippling disasters.
We went to Mexico around the holidays with a group of about 20 people - not all flying the same day. But a number of us flew United, cheap airline tickets to the philippines on Dec. 24,25 and 26. The 24th flight was oversold by 40 people - which they claimed was due to a change in plane model due to that Denver blizzard. Our flight on the 25th was oversold by only a couple (b/c of Christmas?) but they changed cheap airline tickets to the philippines our confirmed seats to standby w/out notification because we d used frequent flyer miles to book. The flight on the 26th was also overbooked by 30 people. Those flying that day found out that actually, when United updated cheap airline tickets to the philippines their quarterly schedule they had changed the plane to a smaller model in October! Yet they never notified those who d already booked the flight that it was now 20% oversold. Did they simply hope there d be that many no-shows on a vacation flight? This wasn t some Chicago-DC