Some travellers stranded by the great snowstorm of 2010 discovered a new lifeline for help. When all else fails, Twitter might be the best way to book a seat home.
While the airlines' reservation lines required hours of waiting if people could get through at all savvy wired travellers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too.
Since December 27, nine Delta Air Lines agents with special Twitter training were rotating shifts to help travellers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines did the same to help travellers cut through the confusion of a storm that grounded thousands of flights last week.
But not all travellers, of course. Anybody who could not send a Twitter message if their life depended on it found themselves with that familiar feeling that often comes with air travel being left out of yet another inside track to get the best information.
But for those on the digital fast lane, the online help was a godsend.
Danielle Heming spent five hours, waiting for a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., home to New York. Finally, it was cancelled. Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year's Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.
She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue. “It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”
Traffic up
Though airlines reported a doubling or tripling of Twitter traffic during the latest storm, the number of travellers who use Twitter is still small. Only about 8 per cent of people who go online use Twitter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a non-profit organisation that studies the social impact of the Internet. “This is still the domain of elite activist customers,” Rainie said.
Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent's role is to listen to people complain.
“[At] DeltaAssist is worthless,” wrote Amy Zopfi, an event services manager in Las Vegas, who was stuck for hours in Salt Lake City and sent a stream of complaints to the Delta Twitter account.
Delta officials readily admit they cannot solve everyone's problems through Twitter or Facebook. Often, all the people running the accounts could do was to apologise.
Airlines still prefer that travellers use the phone. Arranging itineraries in the limits of a 140-character Twitter message is not always efficient. And many of the people monitoring Twitter sites for airlines are not ticket agents, nor do they have a secret stash of seats. “We consider ourselves an information booth rather than a customer service channel,” said Morgan Johnston, a JetBlue manager of corporate communications.
And airlines have only a handful of people working Twitter and thousands working the phones.
But that does not always help. Susan Moffat of Oakland, California, spent 48 hours trying to get through to JetBlue this week. She wanted to get home from a visit to New York. She finally connected and, after holding for an hour, secured a flight on New Year's Day. The agent told her she might have gotten a quicker response had she used Facebook or Twitter.
Old-school option
A casual Facebook user, Moffat said it never occurred to her that traditional methods of communicating might not be good enough anymore.
“My question is in order to book an airline reservation am I going to have to be friends with a company?” she said. “What about a phone call?”
Still, she realises that might be a very old-school option.
“It's like trying to talk to my kids on e-mail,” she said.
New York Times News Service
