Voice of the Customer, part 2: At Southwest Airlines, a Different Kind of Leadership
In my first installment of this two-parter (Voice of the Customer: Newsweek Blog Scopes Out Readers on Best, Worst Airlines) I peeled back the onion of a Newsweek Budget Travel blog-survey to reveal customer perceptions of two American airlines that are polar opposites of each other.
What drives such extreme differences in customer perceptions of Southwest and United?
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Dear Southwest: Let’s Solve the “Fat” Problem Once and for All. Here’s How.
Dear Southwest Airlines: Your loyal customers LUV you because 1) throughout your history, you have always been an industry innovator; 2) your business model is to keep things lean and simple; and 3) you run your operations based upon a winning strategy of positive relationships.
But you messed up over the weekend with the Kevin Smith blow-up.
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A Dave Carroll/ United Breaks Guitars Update: Song 3, March 2
We love Dave Carroll, the executive-embarrassing, guitar-grieving Canadian arts legend and social media stick-in-the-eye to United Airlines. Dave, in such a fun and good-natured way, has so far delivered 2 of 3 well-aimed rocks between the eyes of the past-its-prime corporate Goliath. His stones, of course, would be United Breaks Guitars Songs 1 and 2, which have together garnered almost 8 1/2 million views on youTube thus far. We haven’t caught up with Dave in a while, so an update is definitely in order.
See, here’s the thing about Dave: There is just so much witty irony swirling around every part of his fractured relationship with United Airlines. Ah, yes … witty irony! let’s start there:
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Voice of the Customer: Newsweek Blog Scopes Out Readers on Best, Worst Airlines
With this post, I begin a two-part mashup in order to make some points about leadership, employee relations, and service culture within the airline industry. I’ve touched upon this before, but my take on it this time introduces some new material; i.e., the observations of customers of two airlines (Southwest and United) in a recent Newsweek blog piece. This is part 1; let’s get started:
Last week, Newsweek’s Budget Travel blog invited its readers to weigh in with their perceptions of who the best and and worst airlines in the industry are. Have a look; there’s nothing scientific about the responses of course, but I thought it might be fun to quantify and summarize the results a bit, in a little “back-of-the-envelope” analysis that turned out to be pretty interesting.
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Airlines: Who’s Doing What for Haiti
The earthquake in Haiti that decimated the island nation’s largest city and much of the surrounding area, continues to be an extremely challenging set of disaster relief problems and human needs, rivaled only by the 2004 tsunami in lower Asia in which more than 500,000 people perished.
The official death toll as of January 28 is 170,000+ dead. Estimates for the total number of dead, which includes those not yet accounted for, exceed 250,000. Over half of Port-au-Prince’s population of 2 million people is in need of emergency shelter; almost all are currently dependent on outside aid groups and transport providers for food, water, medical care, and basic subsistence.
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