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.
Alex is right. The customer paid for a service that was not fulfilled, period. The only thing to come out of Expedia's "mouth" should have been: "We're sorry; How can we fix this?"
Social media has finally made it impossible for large companies to not care about a few screw ups here and there. These people are paying customers who are not satisfied with what they paid for, and they have voiced their dissatisfaction for others to evaluate in relation to their own purchasing choices. Kevin Smith probably saved several "large" people from a really embarrassing experience at the airport. Good for him.
Graham Robertson
Hi Chase. I agree with you, like I said to Alex, I have managed teams that handle overbookings and my first move would have been to pay for an upgrade somewhere else and sort out the hotel later. In this respect, Expedia totally failed.
What originally inspired me to write this post wasn't really either of these stories, but more the way social media has changed the way we follow events. In both cases, you really only get one side of the story and the issue is quickly escalated by how many followers they have. This means some key facts are not always given the attention they deserve, like the fact that Expedia ended up fixing the problem in an hour or that Kevin Smith had purchased 2 seats but was trying to get on an earlier flight. Either way, you're very right- Big companies need to pay attention, wronged customers can get huge attention these days. They can't beat them, so they may as well join in on the conversation.
Overbooking is inexcusable! Remember the Seinfeld episode about the rental car? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSZYsyrP3Co While properties pay commissions to Expedia and the like, I would think they would have a better way to track reservations from these sites. If you want to make sure you have a reservation, book with the property and leave out the middle man, i.e. Expedia. I'm sure the average user of of the middle man booking agents goes to the properties website to see what kind of place it is, if the rate is way off, call them and ask for that rate. You may get it and know you have saved the property a commission plus you got a real reservation.
Will Hughes
While MG shouldn't have been yelling abuse at the staff, Expedia is still in the wrong for bollocking the reservation process.
Sure, it might be that they used a wholesaler that sent back a bad confirmation, but Expedia is still the agent responsible.
If their reservations systems rely on faxes and emails, then they need to cover this by actually having a human at eithere end checking that things were received correctly.
Having five or more screwups like this on one day seems much more like there is a systemic issue with they way Expedia manage their bookings.
Alex Kaminski
You're not undestanding customer service 101. It doesn't matter if a customer understands "the intricacies of hotel allotment and distribution"; the only thing that matters is the customer booked a hotel room and received a confirmation from Expedia indicating that the hotel was booked. Regardless of what mistake was made by who, the customer is paying for Expedia to handle all the booking details. If they send a confirmation it is assumed they did their job (and fulfilled the service they were paid for). In this case, they clearly messed up and MG called them out on it. I have no sympathy for a company that sells a product/service, can't deliver, and tries blames the supplier/contractor/partner for the error. (What's even worse is that Expedia didn't try to do this, you did it for them? Making excuses already, without the facts.) At the end of the day, especially when dealing with customers, you are accountable for the actions of everyone in your "chain".
Besides for these details, you totally skipped over Expedia's lack of customer service and care in this situation (and many others - you need look online or ask a couple friends). Why did he have to "yell" in front of children to get a refund? It should be obvious to any respectable business manager/owner/employee that if a customer pays for a product/service and the business can't deliver the customer - for whatever reason - is entitled for a refund. It's common sense and just good business practice. It shouldn't take 5 phone calls, an hour on hold, and 2 managers to resolve something like this.
I agree that social media is extermely important for companies, but they were in no way attacked. A customer complaining about customer service (even if publicly in social media) is not attacking a company - he is simply complaining. That's very different from a malicious attack which you claim both MG and Kevin Smith tried to do. A company should embrace this opportunity to let other customers know how much they care about every one of their customers and the extent to which they will go to fix these issues.
Graham Robertson
Hi Alex. Thank you for the response, I had hoped we would get a bit of a debate going about this.
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.
The term "Attacked" was used to explain the manor which Kevin Smith went about his responses to Southwest, there seemed to be an unending stream of tweets as well as a fairly vulgar podcast in quick succession. With the Tech Crunch post, I feel MG used the site as a soapbox to reach a huge audience to bag out a company that had let him down. Right or wrong, this didnt have much to do with Tech and seemed to belong more on a personal blog.
I've worked in a customer focused environment since I was 17, not within travel but within IT support and we were always told if a customer gets nasty, then you warn them, if they continue the phone goes down.
As a consumer you are not going to get anywhere by shouting the odds down the phone. I would be interested to know which city that Expedia could not find a hotel, and did the writer actually find a hotel himself in the end?
As I have just mentioned on Tnooz, I always check with the hotel if I have made a booking on a third party website, no matter who they are. i do not trust technology or humans, and I do not want to appear at the hotel to find nothing is booked in for me.
Haha yes, I put that in the post that I wrote about the issue today about the issue of hotels and booking technology. Good point. Maybe it's time for a change of branding ;) .-= Darren Cronian´s last blog ..Time for hotels to catch up with booking technology =-.
Social media attacks!
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.
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.