Exploring the Art & Science of Marketing
JetBlue fiasco and a different take on a passenger bill of rights
You have likely heard about the JetBlue plane at JFK where passengers sat on the tarmac for 11 hours. JetBlue has a major, major fiasco on its hands. If you watch news clips, these people were traumatized (some in tears) over the situation. This whole story almost boils my blood.
A Few Thoughts on the JetBlue Situation
- Apologies work most of the time, but they don’t work when there is no fathomable reason why passengers sat on a plane for that long.
- Free “stuff” works a lot of the time, but one free flight is too easy for the airline to offer. It doesn’t even remotely fit the “pain” someone experiences from sitting in a cramped space for 11 hours. It’s gotta be painful for JetBlue as well.
- What good is a free flight on an airline that isn’t smart enough to get you off a plane sooner than 11 hours? That’s not a free flight, it’s a major risk I don’t think these people are going to take.
If I could find the reference I would, but I read part of a marketing study a few months back that said when someone has a bad experience as a customer, the people they tell about the experience are actually more likely to not buy from that business than the person who had the bad experience. You do the math on the hurt JetBlue will experience from this.
My take on a Passenger’s Bill of Rights
Lawmakers have since said they plan to introduce a “passenger’s bill of rights,” which I think is the wrong direction to go. All this does is create more laws that need to be enforced. I believe the right direction to go is for the airlines to step up and choose to do this on their own and for the people (you and me) to strongly urge them to do this. Leave the government out of it. Too many times we turn to the government and say “please help us.” It’s insane to me how often we as a country do this.
Even the great communicator President Ronald Regan warned about this line of thinking. “They … knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.” – Ronald Regan (via Quoty).
| Print article | This entry was posted by Russ on February 15, 2007 at 8:09 pm, and is filed under Business, Citizen Marketing, Customer Service, Ethics, Free Capitalist, Leadership, Newspaper, PR, Politics, Public Relations, Strategic Marketing, Utah Business, Utah Politics. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
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about 6 years ago
Seems to me jetBlue missed out on a great PR opportunity here. Imagine each passenger that had to sit on a plane more than 2-3 hours was paid $250 per hour for the inconvenience. While 250 of jetBlue’s planes were grounded the new report only talks about three planes that were grounded for extraordinary periods of time. That could mean as many as perhaps 600 angry people, and let’s say they each waited an average of 10 hours.
600 x 10 x $250 = $1.5M. That’s a lot of money, even for an airline. However, how much profit is jetBlue going to lose from the bad press they’ve received? If they had told passengers and the press they would receive this kind of compensation, many of the passengers might have been hoping the delays would be longer, since $250/hr is decent money for sitting around. The press would have had a field day reporting on it, and the goodwill that PR would generate would be cheap at $1.5M. jetBlue would have their planes full for the next two years with people just hoping the plane gets delayed, and dissapointed when their plane only sits on the ground for two hours before taking off.
You might say it would present too much of a future risk for jetBlue if they allowed such a precedent to be set, but do you really think this is ever going to happen again? jetBlue already has an incentive to figure out how to prevent such an occurence again, whether or not they’re risking shelling out that much cash.
Perhaps there are reasons I don’t understand that would make such a thing impossible, but from my perspective this was a missed opportunity to do something extraordinary and ensure fully-booked flights for months or years to come.
about 6 years ago
Too many times we turn to the government and say “please help us.†It’s insane to me how often we as a country do this.
::: applause :::
Hear, hear!
about 6 years ago
Traditionally, when a company or industry institutes a “bill of rights” its not done with any government involvement. A bill of rights in this case – and one supported by me – involves the industry creating policies to make sure these types of incidents don’t happen. A good example of this is the IHC patient bill of rights.
I agree keep the government out. The market is capable of fixing itself.
about 6 years ago
Good point Chris. I should clarify the difference between the two.
about 6 years ago
@Russ
And I should od the same on my blog.
http://www.chrisknudsen.biz/268/its-time-for-an-airline-passengers-bill-of-rights/
about 6 years ago
Just a random comment. You turn on the news and see a winter storm buckling down on the East Coast. You hear news reports that flights are canceled and airports are closed. But hey, let’s go to the airport anyway! I am in no way vindicating Jet Blue for the situation they put themselves in, but, as an airline employee, I see some of the insane things travelers do for their own self interest. Bottom line is this: a free ticket or a bill of rights will never change the weather. There are always going to be winter storms on the East Coast and there will always be people stuck on airplanes. I mean, come on: if you don’t want to drive because the weather is too bad then why would you want to hurdle down a 12,000ft stretch of concrete at 200mph?
about 6 years ago
- Charging passengers for food (one guy paid $3 for a cookie) will only make the matter worse.
I read the article you linked to regarding the guy who paid $3 for a cookie. That guy, Mark Mannix, was on an American Airlines flight. Therefore this particular thought on the JetBlue situation is inaccurate since Mannix was charged for food aboard an American Airlines jet.
about 6 years ago
Apparently, you don’t recall that BEFORE CONGRESS OUTLAWED IT, all the airlines made it standard practice to overbook their flights by ten to fifteen percent, in order to assure that “their costs were as low as possible”. This meant, in practice, that they ALL chronically denied boarding to people ON EVERY FLIGHT.
Got that? Show up at the airport with a confirmed ticket for which you’ve already paid, and you could expect to see people at your gate…including yourself, told “well, I’m sorry, but the flight is full, we’ll try to get you on the next one.”.
No compensation. No voucher. No anything.
Now, the airlines, particularly JetBlue, which has no seat exchange agreement with any other airline and which tries to run at 100% capacity (meaning, if your flight gets cancelled, it can be days before they have another seat to put you on) have proven that UNLESS THEY ARE FORCED BY LEGISLATION, THEY WILL ABUSE THEIR CUSTOMERS.
Their own brand new “Bill Of Rights” says that they consider it normal operations to leave you on the runway for three hours.
Got that? Normal operations. Three hours on the runway.
In addition, they say they will only START trying to find a way to get you off a plane on the runway AFTER FIVE HOURS.
If you think that this is the way to run airlines, I suggest you practice sitting in sewage stench-filled air for 11 hours at a time. That WAS the JetBlue response on 2/14.
If you believe their NEW approach, try it for 5 to 6 hours. That’s much better.
Flyer
about 6 years ago
To the people above blaming the JetBlue 2/14 fiasco on the customers (guy named ‘Zen’):
Ask yourself, “Why was JetBlue so hard hit by this, when other airlines weren’t?”
The answer is, “The other airlines PREEMPTIVELY cancelled some flights in the face of bad weather, and having seat sharing agreements amongst themselves, were able to somewhat quickly place flyers on other flights. JetBlue , in the face of THE SAME WEATHER PREDICTIONS, told their passengers to ‘Come On Down to the airport! No flights are cancelled!’ Then, JetBlue crossed their fingers, shovelled the passengers onto planes, and sent them out on the runways.
The deliberately left them on the runways, hoping that miraculously, the sky would clear, until FINALLY, AT 3 PM, they made their FIRST effort to get people off the planes.
chieftain.com/business/1171709259/4
JetBlue is a different kind of airline. It has no sharing agreements with other carriers. It tries to run at 100% utilization. It has almost no spare plane capacity. This means that it CANNOT react to disruptions in schedule. Which means that it WILL NOT react to disruptions in schedules. It will push you out on a runway when other airlines wouldn’t, and shouldn’t (Think ValuJet, which would only pay pilots if they completed the flight leg).
The JetBlue considerations for your well being are limited to a tiny TV screen. 2/14 proved that with JetBlue, your REAL well-being (your time, your safety, your arrival, your departure) is running a very distant second to the financial and operational realities of JetBlue.
2/14 proved to me that they are an accident waiting to happen.
They need to be told what is acceptable, and what is not. They won’t change in any other way.