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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jetBlue: Relationships + Leadership + Innovation2
Author and journalist Marc Gunther offers up some wonderful insights concerning the nature of jetBlue’s success, in a CNN article published last Thursday that was accompanied a day later by a post in Gunther’s own blog.
Gunther accompanied jetBlue CEO Dave Barger on a flight to jetBlue University in Orlando, the airline’s employee training facility, and his writing seems to confirm that jetBlue is the “new Southwest.”
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The Kennedy Era and the Legacy of Flight
I am mourning the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy this morning. As a child of the 1960s (I was born in 1959) the Kennedys have always been part of my consciousness with regard to who Americans are and what they can be.
As a boy, with a cheap Sears telescope and a Polaroid camera, I took pictures of the moon, inspired by President John Kennedy’s challenge in May 1961 that Americans should fly to the moon and explore it by the end of the decade. Of course we accomplished the president’s goal early and the whole world cheered the brave pilots of Apollo 11 who in 1969, ably flew to the most distant place we could yet reach. It was a singular human accomplishment that has not been surpassed in over 40 years. No country but ours has ever flown man to the moon, to walk there.
As I look back on it now, as I near the age of 50, I realize that the event is so historic and memorable because it happened at the intersection of leadership, science, technology, education, dreams, and daring, and exemplified to the world the better nature of Americans.
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jetBlue: “The CEO’s Guide to Jetting”
From youTube and the little airline you love to love: satirical, topical, oh-so-funny … brilliant!
This is Part 1; click the ‘Read More’ link below this video to see parts 2 and 3. (If, due to youTube latency, you don’t see three videos, please refresh your browser.)
(Dear United: Let your upstart competitor school you in the use of new media and viral marketing!)
Enjoy!
Part 1:
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