Airline Bungles Its Blunder: How American Made A Problem Worse

I’m sitting in the Chicago airport reflecting on another airline blunder I got caught in. If you’ve watched the news at all, you know that American Airlines cancelled thousands of flights last week in order to catch up on some routine maintenance of some planes. I was scheduled to fly on American from Salt Lake City to Chicago on Thursday with my son’s high school band and orchestra tour. The group was scheduled on three different flights, two on American and one on Northwestern. Wednesday morning, American announced that the early flight we were on was cancelled. The tour group scrambled to reschedule people on three other flights getting to Chicago within a day of the original schedule. Then a few hours later, American cancelled the other flight for our group, sending us into scramble mode again. The end result for our group was that instead of all of us arriving in Chicago within a few hours of each other on Thursday afternoon, students were spread across seven flights arriving from Thursday afternoon to late Friday night. I got to escort a group of 13 teenagers from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles and on a red-eye to Chicago arriving at 5 a.m. on Friday. I’m still a little bleary eyed.

American Airlines exhibited one of the common business problems I see today – and one that public relations professionals have to manage in crisis mode. The problem was not WHAT they did. The maintenance of airplanes is important; I support it wholeheartedly. The problem was in HOW they did it. By announcing flight cancellations within hours of scheduled flight times, American left thousands of people across the country stranded in airports and scrambling for flights on other carriers. If they had announced the flight cancellations a day or two in advance of the scheduled flights, people would have had more alternatives for travel plans.

Sometimes business leaders make tough decisions with an attitude of “well, this has to be done” mentality. While that is often true about WHAT has to be done, HOW it is done is equally – and sometimes more – important to key publics. The approach American took shows a distinct lack of interest in their travelers’ needs. It’s just a business decision that “has to be done.” If more consideration was given to the impact on travelers, maybe the implementation would have been different. What might have happened (yes, this is pure speculation) if American Airlines had given customers three or four days notice that flights would have been cancelled. Sure, people would have been put out. Sure people would have complained. Sure, people would have been scrambling to change travel. But they wouldn’t have been doing it while stuck in an airport.

The capper for me was when I was checking in on my re-arranged United Airlines flight to Chicago by way of Los Angeles. United personnel needed a code from American to finalize my reservation. But because American cancelled all its flights out of Salt Lake City, all American employees went home, so there was no one there to help with my ticket. Again, it doesn’t seem they were thinking of the customer.

Lest this become just a diatribe against American Airlines, make this application in your public relations roles. When tough business decisions have to be made, be the one who raises the question, “Which of our key publics is impacted, and how can we minimize that impact?” By doing so, you can make the tough decisions with reduced impact on your organization’s reputation.

As a post script, I just got back to Salt Lake City – but my luggage didn’t. American Airlines left my luggage in Chicago. When we asked about it, they immediately were able to tell me the bag was still in Chicago, but they weren’t able to tell me why it didn’t get on the plane. Hmm. I’m seeing an uncomfortable trend in the treatment of customers.