When US Airways lost thousands of Christmas travelers' baggage for days in 2004, some industry consultants thought it might spell doom for the bankrupt airline. But it didn't.
The airline eventually took responsibility and fixed the problem by hiring hundreds of baggage handlers and spending millions of dollars on equipment. That's Crisis Management 101: Apologize, explain what happened and fix it.
This is what JetBlue Airways has been trying to do since it stranded passengers on planes on snowy New York runways Wednesday for more than 10 hours. The airline is expected to return to full service today after canceling scores of flights over the holiday weekend as it worked to get service on track.
But on the heels of a similar event in Texas over New Year's weekend and a general frustration with airline service, Jet- Blue's recovery might be slower, consultants and public relations professionals say. It could lead to a tipping point in the industry as a growing number of passengers say they aren't going to accept poor treatment anymore. And some are demanding rights backed by force of law.
That would be a change from the past several years as travelers' expectations sank amid the rise of discount airlines and rounds of cost-cutting by full-service carriers. Consultants say travelers have come to care most about cheap seats and convenient schedules - and, indeed, the low fares have prompted a record number of people to fly. But while they might be willing to forgo meals and pillows and even swallow delays and lost luggage without much complaining, travelers might make JetBlue and the rest of the industry pay a little more this time.
"JetBlue is unlucky because this happened to someone else in the industry recently," said Marc Jampole, president of the Pittsburgh-based crisis-management firm Jampole Communications Inc. "JetBlue becomes the poster child, and it doesn't matter right now that they score well in customer service rankings or if they apologize."
Jampole is referring to American Airlines, which stranded passengers on a plane on the ground in Austin, Texas, for more than nine hours. They were headed to Dallas from San Francisco but were diverted because of bad weather in Dallas.
That ordeal motivated passenger Kate Hanni to form the Coalition for Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights. The group is pushing for federal legislation to, among other things, prevent airlines from keeping passengers sitting on the tarmac for more than three hours and compensate those bumped or delayed more than 12 hours with 150 percent of the ticket price.
