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Social Media Attacks!

Two travel related stories are blowing out of proportion this week thanks to social media and the novelty, over-size megaphone it hands to anyone with a decent following.

First up we had Kevin Smith, aka Silent Bob, being thrown off a flight by a Southwest Airline captain for safety risks arising from his size. Kevin took out his anger about the treatment to his 1.6 million Twitter followers, (read Tnooz article here) creating a veritable “Storm in teacup” for Southwest PR to sort out. They did a pretty good job addressing the issue over twitter with Kevin and offered to get in contact with him directly. That being said, it didn’t stop Smith from releasing a podcast titled, ““Go F**k Yourself, Southwest Airlines”. Classy.

It’s hard to fault either party here. I do agree with Southwests large passenger policy, but the process and procedure around its recent implementation is incredibly vague, leaving them open to these kinds of situations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears check-in staff have to visually gauge a passengers size and make a judgment call based on this opinion as to whether they are too large to fly in one seat or not. That aside, I think it’s very brave of Southwest not to back down when faced with someone pulling the, “Don’t you know who I am?” card. If nothing else it shows that their staff are well trained, and more importantly believe in their own policies. It has yet to be seen if the PR team can withstand the Twitter storm.

External Source – For the complete article click here.

Source – T-List

Posted by on February 17, 2010.

Categories: Internet

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