For those who aren’t familiar with “
United Breaks Guitars,” I just want to quickly summarize what happened. In 2008, a musician named Dave Carroll was traveling from Halifax to Nebraska for a tour. While sitting on the plane in Chicago, people witnessed his guitar being thrown around by the baggage handlers. Carroll immediately filed several complaints upon finding out that his $3500 guitar was broken. For several months Carroll perused the issue, only to be given the run around without any promise of compensation for his loss. Carroll promised
United Airlines that he would be writing three different songs to tell airline passengers about his experience.
The two videos released so far have become quick online sensations. I watched both videos on
YouTube and after reading more articles on the situation, I’ve come to the conclusion that United Airlines should have taken care of the situation in the beginning and not let it get out of hand. If a customer puts up a fight for nine months, the airline should give in to the customer and pay the small amount to fix his guitar. According to Dave Carroll, “At that moment it occurred to me that I had been fighting a losing battle all this time and that fighting over this at all was a waste of time.”
United Airline’s customer service and public relations policy needs a makeover. They don’t seem to have an exact plan for handling this type of situation. It would be better if they had a hierarchy or some sort of chain of command for handling customer complaints. Instead of being passed up from the first contact, Carroll’s problem was passed from person to person and even completely ignored by others.
United Airlines put themselves into a bad position by not taking control of the situation. They had nine months to correct their mistake and/or pay for the guitar repairs.
Chris Ayres of The Times Online estimated United Airlines lost revenue at around $180 million dollars. He said “the gathering thunderclouds of bad PR caused United Airlines’ stock price to suffer a mid-flight stall, and it plunged by 10 per cent, costing shareholders $180 million.” It is crazy to think that a YouTube video can spread around the internet in such a short amount of time.
After the video was posted online, the story spread like wildfire with the help of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. United Airlines clearly underestimated the power of
social media and its ability to influence their customers. I think that this situation could have happened to any airline company, it just so happened that United took the first hit.
The new companies of today need to be able to adjust their public relations strategies based on the social media available. Fifteen years ago, this story wouldn’t have spread nearly as far or as fast, but with social media being available to everyone all over the world, normal people like Dave Carroll can drastically affect large corporations. I tried to find a statement by United Airlines about Carroll’s broken guitar, but nothing was available.
United has now had over a year and a half to respond to the situation, but the fact that information about it is not readily available tells us that they have made a big mistake. Even if we don’t have the exact numbers to see how it affected them to date, people are going to be talking about this for years to come. Now that I realize what really happened, it makes me want to fly with a different company with the hopes that they will take better care of their customers.
I am sure that this is United’s worst PR move in their history. I think that it has taught them a vital lesson about customer service and the handling of complaints. Although United is the perfect example of bad PR, there are plenty of other airlines that have problems of their own.
Carroll recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak about airline passenger rights. Hopefully all of the major airlines will take something from this incident and make the appropriate changes to their policies so incidents like this stop happening in the future.
