3 recent airline PR crises and the lessons we learnt from them

As travel continues on its upward trajectory, so do the complaints around customer service woes. In recent times we've seen several regional carriers face damning reports around handling of customer complaints, delays in flights and uncommon requests from passengers.

Probably the one crisis which soared above the rest was Air India’s handling of an unruly inebriated passenger from its flight from New York where the passenger urinated on a fellow female passenger. Instead of aiding the passenger to the fullest, when asked for a change of seat, Air India told the passenger that there was no other seat available except the small seat used by staff. While Air India formed an internal committee to investigate the complaint, the damage was unfortunately done.

Closer to home, we’ve seen several budget carriers from Jetstar to AirAsia and Batik Airways also face the heat in their handling of customer crisis’.  In fact, the reports even prompted Malaysian Aviation Commission (MAVCOM), ahead of Chinese New Year, to take a proactive stance in instructing all airlines to improve flight disruption management due to the expected rise in flight capacity with borders to Chinese travellers opening up and the influx of Malaysians coming home for the Chinese New Year festive season.

In its statement, MAVCOM reminded airlines to take note of their obligations to their passengers under the Malaysian Aviation Consumer Protection Coe (MACPC) and to also resolve the past issues faced by their passengers during flight disruptions and customer service issues.

In this article we’ve highlighted three lessons we can learn from our regional airline crisis’, with insights from Edwin Yeo, general manager at Strategic Public Relations.

 Crisis 1: Handling of uncommon requests

In today’s day and age of social media, how you handle a request by a customer matters. Both Jetstar and AirAsia made headlines when their customers were made to crawl down the aisle of the plane to get to the exit of the plane.

In the instance of AirAsia, a paraplegic passenger had to crawl across a cabin to get to his wheelchair when the plane landed at Changi Airport. A TikTok video of the incident, which has since been deleted, showed that the man was struggling to crawl along the aisle. The video’s caption explained that the passenger landed at Changi Airport and was asked to pay SG$40 for an aisle wheelchair when the passenger's seat was only three metres away from the exit.

Following the incident airasia’s chief airport and customer experience officer, Kesavan Sivandam, told A+M that there are procedures in place for the carriage of disabled or mobility impaired guests including the provision of an aisle wheelchair, which is highlighted during the booking process and can be booked in advance, at the time of booking to ensure a smooth experience. “

We have reached out to the guest to sincerely apologise and will ensure an incident of this nature does not occur again," he added. Unfortunately, with the incident Meltwater statistics showed that that chatter surrounding this issue spiked shortly after with words such as "video of paraplegic", "down aisle", "passenger, "aisle wheelchair", and "disabled man aisle" being associated with the brand.

In a situation not too similar to that of AirAsia’s, Jetstar also found itself in the spotlight for the lack of attention given to differently abled passenger after a passenger from Queensland decided to crawl down the aisle of the plane. This came about as the passenger claimed that the airline asked her to pay for an aisle chair, which is a special transfer wheelchair, to disembark – something she’s never had to do in the past.

In a Facebook post on Monday, passenger Natalie Curtis said the incident was "definitely the most humiliating experience I have had travelling". The incident took place when Curtis was on a flight from Singapore to Bangkok. The news has also been picked up by Australian media.

Expert opinion:

According to Yeo, it is important to understand what constitutes a crisis when it comes to airlines. For both these instances, it was essentially a customer service faux pas, and wouldn't really be seen as a crisis in the eyes of most airlines.

However, with CX becoming more important in this day and age, paying better attention to providing a better customer experience can really carry a brand through even the toughest of times. With mistakes bound to happen, it is the handling and managing of the mistakes that matter most.

Suffice it to say the airlines weren't prepared for a social media crisis, and it was generally handled poorly if you gauge it based on the reactions on social media. However, it's clear that neither airline was set up to deal satisfactorily with such incidents, and they clearly didn't consider either of those incidents as a crisis.

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Crisis 2: Failure to communicate to passenger

In January this year, Malaysian transport minister, Anthony Loke asked Batik Air Malaysia to apologise to its passengers for allegedly leaving them stranded in the airport for a flight that was delayed for about seven hours overnight at KLIA.  This was brought to minister Loke’s attention via Twitter.

Batik Air responded with a letter of apology, which explained and attempted to justify its shortcomings – stating technical issues and weather conditions to be the trigger points that lead to a series of knock-on effects. To compensate the passenger, only the one who posted about the snafu, Batik Air extended a voucher of RM100 which the passenger could utilise to redeem on his next flight.

Meanwhile, Singapore airline owned budget carrier Scoot, in a rather unconventional fashion decided to take off its flight almost five hours before schedule leaving 35 passengers abandoned at an airport in Amritsar, India.

According to media reports, the incident saw outraged passengers complaining to authorities which then led to the clarification that Scoot had in fact informed passengers about the change in flight time over email. Moreover, it also came to light that the travel agent behind the booking for several passengers had failed to inform the passengers.

Expert opinion:

While the case of Scoot can be debatable from a PR perspective, unfortunately what is clear was the negative headlines that emerged post the incident.

However, for Batik Air, from the PR perspective enough wasn’t done to come to the aid of the stranded passengers, said Yeo.

Dissecting the letter Batik Air wrote to the affected customers, Yeo said it was rather poorly written and worded. It was so hard to understand the issues they faced, partly because of the poor English, and it made it impossible to be sympathetic due to their defensive tonality.

A proper PR agency would have definitely been useful in this scenario. But then again, depending on the company, an incident such as this might just be business as usual and hardly qualify as a crisis.

Crisis 3: Communicating between entities

In another berserk incident, a Jetstar flight from Melbourne to Bali was forced to make a U-turn after more than four hours in the air as Indonesian authorities denied it the right to land.

According to a statement put out by Jetstar, the airline said a miscommunication with local authorities as the original flight was delayed and led to a swap of aircraft being used to fly passengers to Bali. Unfortunately, the larger aircraft was not approved by regulators in Indonesia.

Ultimately, Jetstar had to rebook passengers on another flight. According to reports on Guardian, the airline offered affected passengers a $200 travel voucher, and acknowledged the “extremely frustrating experience for customers”.

Expert opinion:

While Yeo did not comment directly on this incident, he shared that many airline brands within the budget space often think promotions to be the solutions to “crisis”. Often it isn’t until the media starts writing about incidents and associating negative words that the brands take a more serious view of it.

“I'd say that was a pretty good indication of how many budget airlines think, that so long as they get their pricing strategy right, and maintain a good safety record, then everything else is secondary to their core consumer group,” he said. 

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