American Airlines Fires Designer Who Reached Out To Disgruntled Customer

from the not-quite-connecting-with-fans dept

A few years back, I remember seeing a fascinating study that showed that how a company responds to a problem or a mistake is more important to customer loyalty than not making any mistakes at all. That is, customers felt more loyal to companies that screwed up, but handled it well, than companies that never screw up at all. If you think about this, it makes a fair amount of sense. At some point or another everyone screws up. Everyone makes a mistake. Customers recognize this. But if a company never makes a mistake, then customers may still wonder how they'll be treated when that future mistake comes. However, if the mistake has been made, and the response was good, the customer is confident that future mistakes will be handled well also.

Of course, the converse situation is true as well. If a company screws up and then screws up the response as well, it causes tremendous harm to a brand -- often in ways that cannot easily be redeemed (if at all). Brendan writes points us to a story of American Airlines seeming to go out of its way to respond poorly to a situation -- after someone from the company had first responded well. It started with a blog post written by Dustin Curtis, complaining about the poor user interface design of American Airlines website (including a suggested redesign). He didn't expect much of a response, but actually received a nice and detailed email from a user design person at American Airlines explaining why it was often tricky to good design at large companies, due to all of the different interests, but says that some good stuff is coming, even if it may take some time.

Now, that's a good response. It's human. It explains the situation without PR/marketing speak that a recipient would know was bogus. It is the type of response that makes someone feel good about American Airlines (mostly). So, how did AA respond?

It fired the guy.

Apparently, higher level folks at American Airlines didn't like the fact that an employee was actually being open and honest with a customer, took the text from Dustin's post (he hadn't named the designer), searched through the email system, identified the guy... and fired him... and threatened to sue the guy if he spoke to Dustin again. As Dustin notes:

When I first learned about this, I was horrified. Mr. X is actually a good UX designer, and his email had me thinking there was hope for American Airlines. The guy clearly cared about his work and about the user experience at the company as a whole. But AA fired Mr. X because he cared. They fired him because he cared enough to reach out to a dissatisfied customer and help clear the company’s name in the best way he could.

The guy's original response was an example of an excellent interaction with a disgruntled customer. It was honest. It responded to his concerns. It was real. It was human. It made Dustin actually reconsider his view of the company. Then, in firing the guy, American Airlines didn't just wipe out that goodwill, it pushed negative feelings well beyond where things had been before. It made it clear that American Airlines does not value honesty. It showed that American Airlines did not value actually engaging with disgruntled customers. It showed that American Airlines did not value trying to make disgruntled customers happy. And, as such, it's also probably giving a lot of people very good reasons not to be customers of American Airlines at all.

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American Airlines Cuts & Pastes Its Keyword Ad Lawsuit; Tries Again With Yahoo

from the search-and-replace dept

Last year, we were surprised to see American Airlines sue Google over the fact that competitors were buying keyword-based ads on American Airlines' trademarks. Plenty of similar lawsuits had been brought, but for the most part (in the US at least), search engines are on the right side of the law. First of all, simply buying keywords based on trademarks isn't considered a violation of the trademark. Trademark law doesn't give you total control over the mark, but it is designed to prevent confusing uses. Advertising against a competitor isn't a confusing use by itself, so long as it's clear that the advertiser is different from the trademark holder. Second, and more importantly, even if it was a violation of trademark, the liability should fall on the advertiser, not the search engine. Since the search engine is just a platform, the real claim should be against whoever created and paid for the advertisement.

Given that the search engines have come out on top in many such cases, we were surprised this past summer to see Google and American Airlines settle the case, while keeping the actual details secret. Initially, it appeared that Google had won the settlement, as it was still possible to find those competing ads. However, it's possible that the terms of the settlement hadn't taken effect yet, as a more recent search no longer finds those ads. Even more damning is the news that American Airlines has now basically done a copy & paste and search & replace on the original lawsuit and re-filed it against Yahoo. It even includes the same mistakes as the first lawsuit. As Eric Goldman notes, this is strange for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Yahoo is known to be much more friendly to trademark holders in such cases. However, this certainly suggests that Google may have caved in its settlement, rather than the other way around. If so, that would have been an unfortunate decision by Google, and Google's settlement may only lead to more trademark holders taking their chances on suing as well.

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Press Starting To Notice WiFi-In-The-Sky Claims Not Being Supported In Reality

from the keep-on-waiting dept

Over the last year or so, a number of airlines have announced that they (finally! really!) will be installing internet access on airplanes for customers to use. Some have announce very aggressive rollouts, but Joe Brancatelli over at Portfolio has noticed that the rollouts all seem way behind schedule -- and quotes an exec at American Airlines (one of the airlines who promised an aggressive rollout) saying that there's clearly something wrong with the technology. Brancatelli tries to get Airgo, one of the main providers of WiFi-in-the-sky service to comment on the delays and: "Aircell isn't talking and refused repeated requests for an interview. Instead, its public-relations agency referred me back to its press releases, most of which said Aircell would be operating by now." He also notes that, despite public claims from various airlines that they'll aggressively wire up a bunch of airlines, those same airlines either haven't submitted an application to the FAA to wire up certain aircraft, or only just submitted them. In other words, despite public posturing, your WiFi connection in the sky may take a bit longer to arrive.

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The Airlines' Ongoing Struggle With Price Aggregation Sites

from the airlines-vs.-aggregators? dept

It's proving pretty difficult to figure out exactly what happened between American Airlines and Kayak last week. Last Wednesday TechCrunch reported that American Airlines was pulling its listings from the airfare search engine. Comments left by Kayak's CEO Steve Hafner and VP Keith Melnick chalked the split up to Kayak's display of AA fares from Orbitz: American had demanded that Kayak suppress the Orbitz listings, and Kayak refused.

Presumably one of two things is making American want to avoid comparison to Orbitz prices: either, as TechCrunch speculates, users clicking the Orbitz option put AA on the hook for two referral fees -- one to Kayak and one to Orbitz; or AA has struck a deal with Orbitz that provides the latter's users with cheaper fares than can be found on aa.com.

Either way, the news doesn't appear to be as dire as it first sounded. It doesn't seem that AA flights will be disappearing from Kayak -- it's just the links to buy them at aa.com that will go missing. As Jaunted points out this might wind up costing flyers a few more dollars, but it shouldn't be a major inconvenience for Kayak customers.

The more interesting aspect of this episode is how it reveals the stresses at play in the relationship between the airlines and travel search engines like Kayak. It's no secret, of course, that the airlines are having a rough time as rising fuel prices put even more pressure on their perennially-failing business model. But while an airline attempting to control the distribution of its prices is nothing new, one can't help but wonder whether ever-narrowing margins might lead to a shakeup of this market.

Kayak, like most travel search sites, gets its data from one of a handful of Global Distribution Services: businesses that charge airlines a fee to aggregate price and reservation information. Some airlines, like Southwest, opt out of the GDS system in order to avoid those fees. Others, like American, participate in the system but try to send as much online business as possible to their own sites. Presumably each airline tries to find an equilibrium point at which the business brought in by participation in a GDS and the payments associated with it add up to the most profit.

But so long as the financial temptation to retreat from the GDSes persists, GDS data will be less than complete. And that creates an opportunity for another kind of fare-aggregation business -- one based upon scraping the data from the airlines' websites. It's been done before, after all, albeit on a limited scale. And since most people recognize that prices can't be copyrighted, there doesn't seem to be any legal barrier stopping such an aggregator from stepping in (nothing besides the need to write a lot of tedious screen-scraping software, that is). Though, of course, that won't stop airlines from suing, but the legal basis for their argument seems pretty weak.

Whether such a business is likely to emerge and succeed, I couldn't say. But it does seem certain that as fuel prices rise we'll be seeing more and more travel industry infighting -- and more and more hoops for online fare-shoppers to jump through.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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American Airlines And Google Settle Keyword Advertising Spat

from the too-bad-it's-secret dept

Despite lawsuit after lawsuit ruling in favor of Google whenever a company sued Google because one of their own competitors was buying keywords based on their trademarks, American Airlines decided to get in on the game as well. Since American Airlines was probably the biggest company to take on Google in this manner, some undoubtedly were hoping that it might actually be able to succeed. However, the two companies have now settled the case. And, while the terms of the deal remain secret, Eric Goldman checked the ads on Google and doesn't see anything that indicates that Google has changed its usual practice of allowing non-confusing ads.

In other words, it sounds like American Airlines lawyers finally looked at the details of earlier rulings and realized the company had close to no chance of winning this. A trademark does not give the holder complete control over the use of the word, and a competitor using the word for competitive advertising is completely legal, so long as they're not using it in a way that is likely to confuse a consumer. Even more important, if there's any liability, it should be on the other advertisers, not Google, which is merely the platform provider.

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WiFi On Airplanes Coming. Does That Mean Airborne Skype?

from the we-can-hope dept

The New York Times says that several airlines are testing in-flight Internet services. JetBlue will apparently be offering free, but crippled service that includes only email and instant messaging. And Crunchgear suggests it will be even more crippled than that: only Yahoo! and BlackBerry-based mail and IM will be supported. For a lot of travelers (including me) that will be completely useless, although I guess something is better than nothing. At the opposite extreme, American (along with Alaska Air) is reportedly working on full-featured Internet access that will allow you to use the applications of your choice, but it will apparently cost around $10. The Times also notes the most intriguing possibility for this service: that Internet access may mean the ability to make VoIP-based phone calls. It's not clear that the Internet connection will be good enough to make phone calls practical initially, but as technology advances, it's only a matter of time before there's enough bandwidth to make calls practical.

The Times calls this a "pitfall" and says that American won't permit Internet-based phone calls. But I have trouble imagining that ban sticking. Once it becomes technologically feasible to make calls, it will be extremely difficult for airlines to enforce a no-calls rule. There's no automated way to block phone calls, and stewardesses will have a difficult time policing the activities of dozens of passengers. The only way it would work is if the caller's neighbor was willing to rat him out, and I suspect that fellow passengers are a lot more opposed to the idea of cell phones on airplanes in the abstract than they would be about an actual cell phone caller in the seat next to them. After all, cell phone calls are commonplace on buses and trains, and while they're occasionally annoying, they're no more annoying than a loud real-life conversation or a crying baby. There's no groundswell of support for banning cell phone calls on public transit, despite the fact that the annoyance factor is exactly the same. One possibility is that we'd see different airlines cater to different customers, with some airlines aggressively prohibiting airplane-based phone calls and others allowing them. My guess is that business travelers, who generate a disproportionate share of airline revenues, will find the ability to get work done on the airplane to be worth the minor inconvenience of occasionally having to listen to a neighbor's phone call, and so airlines that permit calls will be more profitable.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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American Airlines The Latest To Sue Google Over Trademarked Keywords

from the don't-they-have-more-important-things-to-focus-on? dept

You would think that with a number of judges already stating that keyword advertising based on a trademarked term is not trademark infringement that companies would stop filing such lawsuits. Apparently, you'd be wrong. And, oddly, the latest company to file such a lawsuit isn't a small no-name company (as is usually the case), but American Airlines who is suing Google for showing ads when people search on American Airlines. There are many problems with this lawsuit. First and foremost, suing Google is going after the wrong party. Google isn't the one doing the advertising, they're simply providing the billboard on which advertisers can write what they want. If there is infringement, then it should be the liability of the advertisers, not Google. Second, it's most likely not trademark infringement. Trademarks, unlike copyrights and patents, aren't designed to give the company full control, but just to prevent customer confusion. As long as the ads aren't misleading people into thinking that clicking on them will take them to American Airlines' own site, then it's hard to see how it's trademark infringement. It's perfectly legal (and good business) to advertise in a place when someone is looking for the competition. That's why you see discount coupons in supermarkets right next to competing products. Also, American Airlines is apparently complaining that some of the advertisers, while legally selling American Airlines tickets, also sell competitors' tickets. There's absolutely nothing illegal about that. If a company legitimately sells AA tickets, and someone does a search on American Airlines, why shouldn't they be able to point out that they sell AA tickets -- even if they also sell someone else's tickets? So far, most of these lawsuits end up going quite poorly for the complaining company, so this seems like it's likely going to be a waste of time and money for American Airlines, at a time when it would seem like they have a lot more pressing problems to be solving.

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Two Airlines Move Ahead With In-Flight Internet Plans

from the looking-through-the-clouds dept

One of the many modern tech myths seems to be the idea that in-flight internet access is guaranteed to be a success, even though this has proven not to be the case. The supposed demand for the service among travelers hasn't been enough to overcome the cost of the service, both for airlines and end users, and technical barriers, as highlighted by the failure of Boeing's much-hyped Connexion service. Now, however, one of the airlines that offered Connexion, Lufthansa, says it's working with T-Mobile to bring back in-flight internet access, while American has signed a deal with AirCell to offer its service to travelers on some planes. Lufthansa wants a system that supports WiFi, but also SMS and cellular data, though it won't allow cellular voice calls; American plans to test WiFi access on some transcontinental domestic flights before deciding whether to proceed. The American system will differ from Connexion in that it won't use satellites, but an air-to-ground radio system, explaining why it will only be available domestically. Hopefully this will translate into lower costs for consumers than the $30 per flight Connexion charged, otherwise the service will suffer the same fate. Lufthansa is reportedly looking at a satellite-based system for its long-haul flights, and unless it's figured out some way to slash the costs of such a system and pass the savings on to consumers, it's hard to see things working out any better this time around.

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