Home / Australia, By Language, By Region, English, Industry, Marketing Secrets, Technology, Tourism Marketing, Travel 2.0, Travel Agents, Travel Research / Social media attacks!
2010-02-15

Social media attacks!

By Graham Robertson

Two travel related stories are blowing out of proportion this week thanks to social media and the novelty, over-size megaphone it hands to anyone with a decent following.

First up we had Kevin Smith, aka Silent Bob, being thrown off a flight by a Southwest Airline captain for safety risks arising from his size. Kevin took out his anger about the treatment to his 1.6 million Twitter followers, (read Tnooz article here) creating a veritable “Storm in teacup” for Southwest PR to sort out. They did a pretty good job addressing the issue over twitter with Kevin and offered to get in contact with him directly. That being said, it didn’t stop Smith from releasing a podcast titled, ““Go F**k Yourself, Southwest Airlines”. Classy.

It’s hard to fault either party here. I do agree with Southwests large passenger policy, but the process and procedure around its recent implementation is incredibly vague, leaving them open to these kinds of situations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears check-in staff have to visually gauge a passengers size and make a judgment call based on this opinion as to whether they are too large to fly in one seat or not. That aside, I think it’s very brave of Southwest not to back down when faced with someone pulling the, “Don’t you know who I am?” card. If nothing else it shows that their staff are well trained, and more importantly believe in their own policies. It has yet to be seen if the PR team can withstand the Twitter storm.

The second social media explosion came from a post on tech blog Tech Crunch. Writer MG Siegler clearly had a less than satisfactory experience this Valentines day when trying to check in to a hotel booked through Expedia. It seems MG experienced something all too common, the dreaded “Overbooking”. I can relate to MG on this one, no one wants to find out their holiday is in jeopardy due to some kind of booking error, but that is where my sympathy ends.

In open forum, MG admits to swearing and carrying on in front of passers-by and children, “At this point I start really yelling. On the street. With a lot of children around.” There’s nothing worse than someone so irate they’ll no longer listen to logic. Add to that a complete lack of understanding about the travel industry or the booking engine used by Expedia and you have the recipe for disaster. MG goes on to attack the booking system,” Because it would be too much of a hassle, and more importantly, cost too much money, Expedia has an automated system for communicating with its partners. Sometimes this is done with an email, sometimes this is done with a fax. Yes, a fax.” Unbeknownst to MG, the reason for this mixture of communication mediums usually has nothing to do with the wholesaler, but more to do with the hotels outdated systems. If Expedia have an integrated booking engine with the hotel and can confirm bookings from allotment, I’m sure they would use it. Unfortunately, not all hotels have have such a system and rely on fax or email.

Without fully understanding the intricacies of hotel allotment and distribution, MG takes his uninformed personal opinion and puts it forth to the masses in a rant that treads dangerously close to defamation.

Any company that still believes ignoring social media will make it go away or somehow minimize its damage needs to look at these two unrelated issues. In both cases the companies involved were directly attacked via social media after what seemed like a small lapse in procedure or in Expedia’s case, an accident. What set Southwest apart was it’s quick response over the same network, hopefully Expedia will do the same.

This post was originally posted by Graham Robertson @ projectwander.com.
> Read the original post here
 Subscribe to the RSS Feed for Graham Robertson

Written by Graham Robertson · Filed Under Australia, By Language, By Region, English, Industry, Marketing Secrets, Technology, Tourism Marketing, Travel 2.0, Travel Agents, Travel Research 

If you liked this post, you might like these other posts:

Comments

  • Quite an interesting post which brings me a thought that social media has indeed become phenomenal, highly influential, and highly utilized. Thanks for this great article.
  • Regardless of the "Without fully understanding the intricacies of hotel allotment and distribution" Expedia did not handle itself well and as someone that does understand the above, if this had happened to me, I would have had a meltdown too.

    In terms of hotels outdated systems, its easy to pawn the blame off on them, but if one can come up with the thousands of dollars many of them need to upgrade their systems to where the lofty Expedia can communicate with them "easily" then you'd be the hero of thousands, not to mention how about those hotels that do have upgraded systems and the customers that have still had problems with their bookings and have booked through Expedia? Go ahead and blame the hoteliers for this instead of having Expedia straighten out their system.
  • grayum_ian
    Hi Heather, I see your point, but please read this post from Tnooz: http://www.tnooz.com/2010/02/18/news/expedia-says-no-faxes-involved-in-techcrunch-fiasco/
    . Someone made a smiliar comment to this on my site and I gave this response:
    "Having managed global overbooking for a wholesaler before, I can tell you this is number one when it comes to a worst case scenario. As you pointed out, Expedia is responsible for their own bookings and I totally agree. In this case, however, they had no knowledge until check in on one of the busiest days of the year. It could be argued that the frontline staff that took the call either had bad/no business acumen or creativity to find a solution, meaning that multiple supervisors and managers had to get involved but when you really break it down, the entire ordeal lasted 2 hours. I won’t say this is good, not by a long shot, but considering the situation I do think they did their best. Again, as you pointed out, I am assuming this was an overbooking but it does look this way from the info provided."

    If they had been my staff, I would have had them upgrade to a room available at our cost and have the hotel compensate afterwards.
  • More clear proof that companies do not control their brands, customers do. While these two examples might be exceptions as far as getting attention is concerned, they are an indicator of what is going on permanently today. Another manifestation is the famous TripAdvisor list of worst hotels based on customer comments. It all shows that there is no alternative to actively monitoring the conversation about your brand and then quickly react to it without the right mindset and then the tools this is impossible. Southwest is a great example of how this is done well. Others should learn from them and follow their example. Sitting on the fence and complaining about unfairness is not an option.
  • Great article! In addition to this, Social media can be said to have three components; 1.Concept (art, information, or meme). 2. Media (physical, electronic, or verbal). 3. Social interface (intimate direct, community engagement, social viral, electronic broadcast or syndication, or other physical media such as print).
blog comments powered by Disqus