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Bonus Tactics article: Quick take — PR pros evaluate JetBlue’s crisis response

February 27, 2007

By Chris Cobb

It was Valentine’s Day, but love and affection were the furthest emotions from the minds of hundreds of passengers stuck inside JetBlue aircraft on the ice-covered tarmac of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

In what the apologetic airline’s founder and CEO David Neeleman has willingly admitted was a monumental communications foul up, JetBlue officials essentially held their passengers captive without food or proper toilet facilities when a call to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs area airports, would have quickly solved the problem.

“We should have called them sooner,” Neeleman told The New York Times several days later. He also said he was “humiliated and mortified” by the airline’s response. He wasn’t alone in that assessment.

Passenger Mark Mannix, a government affairs officer for New York’s Metro-North Railroad stuck for five hours on a Florida-bound flight, had one of the more polite, but typical, responses to reporters’ questions.

“It’s pretty shocking,” he told the Associated Press. “We’re pretty much cattle. We’re at their mercy. They don’t seem like they have a plan or are prepared. Like this is the first time they had a snowfall.” Mannix noted that attendants on his flight made food available, but showed no inclination to offer comfort or compensation — he had to pay $3 for a cookie.

A mixed reaction

JetBlue’s damage control, featuring Neeleman as the airline’s public face, was immediate, apologetic and highlighted by a new Customer Bill of Rights detailing a compensation package for passengers. In it, the company promised to take necessary action so that customers may deplane when facing a ground delay of more than five hours and said it would provide customers with food and drink, access to restrooms and, as necessary, medical treatment. The airline offered refunds and free round-trip travel to the hundreds of passengers impacted by the Valentine Day delays. Whether any of those ill-treated consumers would want to fly JetBlue again is another question.

Opinion as to the effectiveness of JetBlue’s response is mixed across the PR community. (To be fair, JetBlue wasn’t the only airline affected by the storms that clobbered the Northeast on Feb. 14. However, they seemingly received the brunt of the negative media coverage.)

Patricia Vaccarino, managing partner of Seattle-based Xanthus Communications and a regular JetBlue traveler, tells Tactics she has witnessed enough of the airline’s customer-service missteps firsthand to convince her that the JFK melt down was an inevitable conclusion to a corporate behavior pattern.

Vaccarino says she has twice been on delayed JetBlue flights because passengers — one, an elderly couple and the other a father with a toddler — were ordered off the aircraft for no apparent good reason.

“I was shaken by their failure to communicate to the [other] passengers what was going on — a textbook rule of crisis management 101,” she says. “Jet Blue personnel have not been trained to deal adequately with the needs of passengers, nor have they been trained how to communicate externally with anyone who is outside the organization, even if it means placing a call to the control tower to determine when to come in from a storm.”

Las Vegas-based PR consultant Ned Barnett, a longtime contributor to aviation publications, called JetBlue’s response “totally inadequate.”

“Once news got out of what they’d done, they needed to take immediate action, perhaps giving each passenger $10,000 — $1,000 for each hour they were held against their will — and a lifetime pass on [the airline],” he says. “Then make announcements of major top-end restructuring and a sweeping new policy on passenger rights. The short-term cost would be peanuts compared to the long-term benefits in demonstrating that what happened was not acceptable.”

Robin Matell, former vice president of corporate communications for Eastern Airlines and now a teacher of crisis communications at Columbia College in Chicago, has a different take.

“I give them an A-plus for the way they handled it,” says Matell, who was in airline public relations for more than 30 years. “They didn’t back away from their problems and were very public in admitting their mistake. Most important, they put a face on the company in the form of the CEO. He was out there from day saying what had happened, how it had happened and what they were going to do to fix it.”

Neeleman’s rapid response saved JetBlue from permanent reputation damage, Matell says.

“Despite all the passengers we saw on TV and in the newspapers saying they will never fly JetBlue again, I would guess they are the minority,” Mattel says. “The public is very forgiving, especially when they can relate directly to an individual who lets it all out and says ‘we’re not going to kid you. We made a mess. We have basically outgrown our operation structure as a low-cost carrier and we’re going to change that.”

Florence Quinn, president New York-based Quinn & Co., a PR adviser to several travel companies, is equally effusive in her praise of the airline. She says Neeleman has rewritten the book on crisis communications.

“JetBlue has been brilliant,” says Quinn, who counts the Israeli airline El Al among her clients. “They gave the media so much positive news to write about — apologies, taking responsibility, refunds and a bill of rights — that the airline’s new news effectively stopped the media from continuing to report on the ugliness of the situation.”

Albert Maruggi, who was director of communications for Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner in the first George Bush administration, notes that the JetBlue share price bounced back to its pre-Valentines Day level in less than two weeks. “So I guess that’s a measure of the perspective of one sector of their audience,” he concludes.

But Maruggi, now president of the St. Paul, Minn.-based firm Provident Partners, says JetBlue didn’t take enough care with how it communicated through its Web site or YouTube. The airline, he says, offered no context through either medium as to why it was introducing its bill of rights.

“Some people might give him high marks for being unscripted, but if you listen to the whole piece, Neeleman . . . is almost to the point of rambling,” says Maruggi. “Then he shows this badge. What’s that about? Like he’s got a badge so I’m not going to be stranded on a plane? He doesn’t use the medium or his own forum to say ‘this is what happened from our perspective.”

But New York media and marketing consultant Robb Hecht says JetBlue’s instincts were correct when they introduced the bill of rights on Feb. 20 — essentially to empower people who had been rendered powerless by the airline’s own actions on Valentines Day. He says, it could even create a new customer service standard for the airline industry.

“JetBlue could be seen as carrying the consumer rights flag,” he says, “and if they continue to push that, I think their loyal passengers will like it and it could bring them new customers.”

Author and journalist Chris Cobb is a senior writer at the Ottawa Citizen newspaper in Canada’s capital where he specializes in reporting on media and government communication.

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