Stef Lynn of Boston, Massachusetts, left her Kindle Paperwhite in a seatback pocket of a Delta Air Lines flight in early November. She wrote that she felt “so lost without it” and asked Delta to “Pleaaaaaaaaaaase” find it for her.
Lynn posted about this multiple times on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Anonymous media agents for Delta responded to her requests. First, they promised to make “every effort to locate it as soon as possible” and told her how to file a report.
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When she had done so and posted again, Delta responded, saying, “If the item is located, Delta's Centralized location will attempt to contact you via email with instructions on arranging the item's return.” At press time, it was unclear if the e-book reader had been recovered.
At about the same time, James Dee Warren of Salina, Kansas, requested in a post that American Airlines “hold flight 6143 for 15 more minutes. Please!” American agents responded, “We can't make any promises, but the team will know you're on your way to the connecting flight.”
Alaska Airlines was more limited but less anonymous with its commitments. After Stephanie Tastad of Snohomish County, Washington, complained that her new luggage had been mangled in shipping, Alaska’s “Jordan” quickly replied, “So sorry to see this! Did you file a claim?” When the flier replied with details about why a claim had not yet been filed, one “Nadine” entered the thread with a number to call. “Unfortunately, we do not have access to their system via social media,” Nadine explained.
A lost item, hustling to make a connecting flight, damaged luggage: All three of these problems are, unfortunately, common inconveniences of modern air travel. Almost as common are complaints about these inconveniences on social media, which only tend to accelerate during holiday travels.
Most airlines have hired a small phalanx of PR people to respond to these complaints publicly, for a number of reasons. These airline social media agents almost always apologize. They offer some complainers direction on how to fix or lessen the problem. They promise more private follow-ups in “DMs,” short for “direct messages.” But how often do these social media agents actually solve the problem?
“I'd say that it's a kind of PR that is unlikely to help travelers much,” Laura Penny, author of the book Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit, told the Washington Examiner.
She added, “It's also an indication that airlines know they're providing a service that isn't always great, so they are trying to address that by making public pronouncements on social media rather than improving things in a more meaningful way, like hiring more people to help travelers at the airport or on the old-timey phone.”
One expert on the business of travel insisted social media complaints still might produce some good results.
“As a consumer you can still get help from some brands,” Gary Leff, author of the influential View from the Wing website, told the Washington Examiner. He pointed out, “@AmericanAir on twitter is still helpful with reservations and other issues.”
Plus, the old adage that the squeaky wheel gets the grease still proves true in the information age.
“You can still go viral and get attention,” Leff said. “I highlighted a woman recently who was stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars in recovery costs after an Airbnb guest damaged her home, and the platform was stonewalling her on their coverage. Once she got the social media world's attention, she got coverage for the issue.”
The size of one’s platform may also matter in terms of grease allocation.
“On Saturday, February 13, 2010, filmmaker Kevin Smith, after being told by Southwest Airlines to leave a plane he boarded, angrily sent out a tweet to his 1.6 million Twitter followers claiming that he had been kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for being ‘too fat,’” wrote Priyanga Gunarathne, Huaxia Rui, and Abraham Seidmann in a 2014 research paper for the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School.
Because of the passionate responses of Smith’s many fans, things escalated quickly. “Sixteen minutes later, Southwest Airlines, which had over 1 million Twitter followers, responded and started to de-escalate the crisis,” the Rochester researchers write.
The research paper found that airlines “pay significantly more attention to Twitter users with more followers,” and that some complaints weren’t responded to at all. Over the survey period, “among the 220,677 tweets sent to American Airlines, 103,059 were responded, and among 178,038 tweets sent to United Airlines, 49,047 were responded.”
The response rate has only grown since the Rochester report’s completion in 2014. Four years later, online reputation expert Cynthia Boris wrote that “every major US airline — except one — has their Twitter response time down to under an hour” and that a few airlines had shortened their response times to less than five minutes.
Moreover, a few airlines appear to have gotten good at not just responding promptly but actually addressing problems via social media. Take American, which Leff held up as the gold standard.
“My wife and I were 33,000 feet in the air, somewhere over Spain, a few years back when we realized there was an issue with our American Airlines boarding passes,” Kyle Potter, executive editor of the Thrifty Traveler website, wrote.
Their TSA PreCheck accounts weren’t registering, which would have put the couple in serious jeopardy of missing their connecting flight. So Potter did something about it from cruising altitude.
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“I connected to the inflight Wi-Fi and sent a message to the @AmericanAir account,” he explained. “Within three minutes, the airline responded. And within 15 minutes, it was all sorted.”
Flier beware, however. Because social media complaints about airlines and airlines’ replies have become so ubiquitous, a huge number of scam accounts have been established that purport to “solve” your problem, with a little extra information for verification of course. In this season of holiday travel, extra vigilance might help travelers avoid scams while they work to sort out their flights.