From August 2011 By Everett Potter
Lost luggage and
rude attendants may make you want to scream. Here are the U.S. airlines
that people complained about the most.
When Andrew Schrage
discovered that his seatback TV wasn’t working on his JetBlue flight from Chicago to Boston,
he didn’t wait until he landed to complain to the airline. Schrage, an editor
at the website MoneyCrashers.com,
tweeted @JetBlue before the plane
took off, and the airline responded - with a $50 voucher.
Twitter may be
changing how we complain to the airlines, but there’s still a lot to complain
about. According to the latest Department of Transportation (DOT) report, the
agency received nearly 3,600 complaints about airlines from January to June,
2011. That’s a lot of
complaints, even if it is an improvement from the nearly 4,000 received over
the same period last year. Not surprisingly, complaints about flight delays and
cancellations, rude or incompetent service, and baggage handling led the list.
But what these
stats don’t tell you is that legions of consumers are now voicing their
complaints directly with the airlines via Twitter. And the airlines - or at least
some of them - are listening, responding, and in some cases being proactive and
fixing the issues. Stephanie Dressler,
a senior associate at Manhattan-based Montieth & Company, missed her
Delta flight to Miami in August 2011 because of
an exceptionally slow-moving check-in line at New York’s JFK. So she tweeted pictures of
the line to her followers. By the time she arrived in Miami, Delta had apologized to her via
Twitter, and on her way home she was upgraded to Delta priority - and coveted
exit-row seats.
Clearly, it’s
faster to broadcast a complaint in 140 characters or less than to call customer
service or log a complaint with the DOT. But not all airlines are
listening - some, like Skywest, have Twitter pages that are mere bookmarks.
Others, like American Airlines, have eight rotating community managers on
Twitter and receive 30,000 tweets per month, according to the airline’s social
media communications director, Jonathan Pierce. Of course, anyone
can tweet anything; lodging an official complaint with the DOT means you have a
serious gripe. Here are the U.S.
airlines the DOT says have had the most - and least - complaints.