“I can now attest to at least one practical use for travelers: complaining. As
hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service.
Take Tony Wagner, 34, a new-media director for an academic group in Washington. When he found out he wasn’t seated next to his wife and 2-year-old daughter on a JetBlue flight to San Francisco over the Memorial Day weekend, he first called up customer service. But the agent told him to take it up at the gate. So Mr. Wagner indirectly sent JetBlue a message, by posting a plea for help on his Twitter account: “@jetblue Advice to get both parents and 2 yr old seated next to each other on flight later today? Right now only one parent. Full flight.”
Exactly 19 minutes later, JetBlue tweeted back, suggesting they correspond privately, using Twitter’s “direct message” feature: “@tonywagner Please follow us so we may DM!” After a brief exchange, JetBlue flagged his tickets as a priority concern.
Mr. Wagner suspects he received better service because of Twitter’s viral nature. Twitterers habitually “re-tweet” one another’s posts, not unlike forwarding an e-mail message to everyone in your address book. Companies, he said, “want to head off the conversation as quickly as possible,” adding, that “it’s in their best interest to make people who have a pulpit happy.”
JetBlue puts a more positive spin on it. Disgruntled customers “tend to be the biggest opportunities,” said Morgan Johnston, a spokesman for the airline who helps manage its Twitter account, which has more than 770,000 followers. “We can take that person aside and kind of pull them in and say, ‘Hey, you seem to be really upset in front of several hundred or thousand people.’ ”
That might explain why some customers prefer Twittering over contacting customer service directly. “Their reaction time is speedier than being put on hold,” said Sydney Owen, 24, a public relations intern from Chicago who recently tweeted about a Southwest boarding pass she had misplaced and received a nearly immediate response from the airline.
The immediacy of Twitter is also what appealed to Tony Haile, 32, the general manager of Chartbeat, a Web analytics site in New York City. When he noticed that the in-flight movies on Virgin America’s New York-San Francisco route hadn’t changed in several weeks, he tweeted, “How many months have to go by before Virgin America change their movies.” What happened next, Mr. Haile said, “absolutely gobsmacked me.” Moments later, Virgin America responded with an apology and an explanation: “We’ve faced a loading delay the last couple of weeks, so it will likely by June 1.”
“I never ever had that level of customer service before,” Mr. Haile said.
” ( via nytimes.com ) by MICHELLE HIGGINS
Pointswizard.com Spin: Click here to read the rest of Twitter helps Travelers
upgrades available?”.
beach. Rafts and coolers get pulled out of garages, Frisbees and games like Boggle that may not have been used all year are all of a sudden travel essentials.
