Winter Snow Storms: What the Airlines Need to Do for Passengers
Why the airlines canceled thousands of flights before you got to the airport.
Feb. 17, 2010 — -- A reader of my blog is still steaming because of her canceled flight out of New York last week. She knew it was snowing hard, and that other airlines had canceled flights at JFK, but her airline insisted her flight was still on.
And so it was, right up until the moment when everyone gathered up their things in preparation for boarding. Then they canceled it.
"I wasted half a day of vacation, wasted money on transportation to the airport and then back home," she wrote. "All in all, it was just a hot mess."
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And that really is a shame because many airlines -- including my reader's -- were proactive, canceling many flights well in advance of the storms, and letting their customers know via phone, e-mail, Twitter and even on Facebook pages.
Could they have done better? You'd better believe it; more on that in just a moment.
But while the new pro-activity is great, goodness knows customers haven't always been treated with such care. In fact, in perhaps the most notorious incident ever, passengers likened their fate to being in a … prisoner-of-war camp.
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It happened on Valentine's weekend three years ago: icy weather grounded JetBlue planes at Kennedy. Not not only didn't the carrier not cancel ahead of time -- it kept the passengers (hundreds of them) on the planes on the tarmac -- for up to 10 1/2 hours. One passenger was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "It was like -- what's the name of that prison in Vietnam where they held McCain? -- the Hanoi Hilton."
JetBlue learned a hard lesson three years ago: not only did its reputation take a dive, but the incident cost the carrier an estimated $44 million in lost revenue (from canceled flights and "we're sorry" vouchers for angry passengers).
Contrast with that with JetBlue's proactive performance during 2010's awful weather; a spokesmen, quoted in a news report, actually said, "We've been doing it ever since our infamous Feb. 14th debacle because we found that it's easier and healthier for the system … rather than leaving it to chance."
