Tommi – I’ll think you’ll find Delta have been doing a chapter 11 hokey cokey for the past decade or so I agree with your comments though, just when these companies have no incentive to provide good service, and the workforce are just waiting for the next round of redundancies, crappy customer service is always the result…

I hear you. We’ve all had similar experiences with flights involving the American carriers, and Thelf’s comment – avoid American carriers if you can, so for us who live overseas – try to book always to a flight that terminates in the city where you want to arrive…

But yes, on more of the themes of my blogsite and my fourth book, Communities Dominate Brands, this is a great example of what bad customer-experiences mean today, in the Connected Age. Some day in the future, any customer-service organization (like Delta) would have a few of their PR staff continuously trolling the web to find complaints like your’s Russell, and react to it and come here to provide a polite, honest recognition of what happened, and that their company is listening and trying to resolve issues. Obviously not yet today, but this is the future, it has to happen. And companies that don’t “get it” will go out of business.

This one incident will not bankrupt Delta by itself. But the actions by the airline clearly show that it is ill-prepared for customer advocacy and community behaviour of the Connected Age. Delta’s behaviour was symptomatic of how they deal with this kind of problems. They will repeat this mistake again and again, and every time they alienate some passengers. And through the word-of-mouth such as your blog, the bad reputation spreads MUCH further than before the connected age. It also spreads much FASTER than before. And as the blogosphere spreads faster than any previous network, we’re at 43 million blogsites already – the power of community only grows stronger.

Fascinating posting, I share in your pain Russell, and hope that all customer-service organizations, whether airlines and hotels or any consumer business, will learn soon.

Tomi Ahonen
author and blogger on communities
http://www.tomiahonen.com
blogsite http://www.communities-dominate.blogs.com

Never fly charter and NEVER ever under any circumstances fly with an American airline…..