Thursday, August 14, 2008

Add censorship to the airline/China comparison

It was about 10 seconds after I posted the item below, which cleverly compares the airline industry to the oppressive Chinese government, when this item came to my attention from Chris Elliott's blog.

It appears a grandmother was led off a JetBlue flight in handcuffs for videotaping an on-board skirmish.

My beef is officially with JetBlue management and not the rank-and-file employees, but I have to ask: what were those flight attendants thinking?

Looks like the JetBlue PR flacks will be taking more shrapnel...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had the same experience on Jetblue this past Monday-- my Boston to Long Beach flight was cancelled and I was given the same choice you were of a refund or re-booking on another Jetblue flight... three days later. When I called customer service they essentially told me to get lost. I just emailed them about it; they pinged back a form letter saying they were currently experiencing "a high volume of correspondence" and would get back to me in, oh, about seven to ten days. Yeah, I BET they're experiencing a high volume of correspondence.
I, too, used to love flying Jetblue -- and I'd pay more to keep flying with them if they handled curveballs a bit better. But giving people the choice between a refund (which won't come anywhere near covering the cost of a last-minute booking on another airline) or living in the airport for three days is cruel and unusual punishment for brand loyalty.
You go, Bill.
Lori G.

Unknown said...

Just this past Thursday I went through a similar experience trying to return to Portland OR from Syracuse; we were stuck for days until we gave up, rented a car, drove to Albany NY to fly home on Southwestern. Cost us over 3x the initial fare altogether, plus the lost work days. But where are the stories of hundreds of folks on these flights must have been affected? The refund, which will take "2 weeks"to show up on the credit card, will be less than half the round trip fare. Hmmm.