You have likely heard about the JetBlue plane at JFK where passengers sat on the tarmac for 11 hours. JetBlue has a major, major fiasco on its hands. If you watch news clips, these people were traumatized (some in tears) over the situation. This whole story almost boils my blood.
A Few Thoughts on the JetBlue Situation
- Apologies work most of the time, but they don’t work when there is no fathomable reason why passengers sat on a plane for that long.
- Free “stuff” works a lot of the time, but one free flight is too easy for the airline to offer. It doesn’t even remotely fit the “pain” someone experiences from sitting in a cramped space for 11 hours. It’s gotta be painful for JetBlue as well.
- What good is a free flight on an airline that isn’t smart enough to get you off a plane sooner than 11 hours? That’s not a free flight, it’s a major risk I don’t think these people are going to take.
If I could find the reference I would, but I read part of a marketing study a few months back that said when someone has a bad experience as a customer, the people they tell about the experience are actually more likely to not buy from that business than the person who had the bad experience. You do the math on the hurt JetBlue will experience from this.
My take on a Passenger’s Bill of Rights
Lawmakers have since said they plan to introduce a “passenger’s bill of rights,” which I think is the wrong direction to go. All this does is create more laws that need to be enforced. I believe the right direction to go is for the airlines to step up and choose to do this on their own and for the people (you and me) to strongly urge them to do this. Leave the government out of it. Too many times we turn to the government and say “please help us.” It’s insane to me how often we as a country do this.
Even the great communicator President Ronald Regan warned about this line of thinking. “They … knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.” – Ronald Regan (via Quoty).