United Airlines: What a Difference a Year Makes
Christine Simeone, Executive Vice President, LPP
As a communications professional who owns how a company responds to a crisis, there are a few key tenets that should drive everything you do:
- Be transparent – to maintain credibility
- Take accountability – it goes a long way with key stakeholders
- Be responsive – to avoid stakeholders and the industry thinking the company doesn’t care
- Be flexible and adaptive to changing dynamics – even the best plan may need to change quickly
These are also a great baseline to evaluate how a company handles communication during a crisis. In the case of United Airlines, comparing its handling of the recent incident when a passenger’s dog died after a flight attendant required its carrier be placed in an overhead bin to last year’s issue when a passenger was forcibly removed from a flight shows a stark contrast.
There’s no debating the ugliness of the issues the United communications team has had to deal with for some time. Assessing processes for potential breakdowns that could lead to tragic outcomes or making changes to prevent what happened from happening again are not the purview of the communications team. However, it is their responsibility to minimize reputation damage and provide a foundation for reputation recovery from situations like these.
Doing this effectively requires the right words and actions at the right time. United’s reputation has taken another hit with the latest animal-related incident. However, the handling of these was vastly improved from last year’s passenger situation.
This week, in a matter of hours, United came out with a strongly-worded statement acknowledging the tragedy, taking full responsibility and committing to a thorough investigation (see #2 and #3 above).
Several hours later, United provided additional details about the incident. The company was transparent about the flight attendant being told there was a dog in the carrier. An apology was included as well as a restatement of the company taking accountability and offering the family support (see #s 1, 2 and 3).
In another 24 hours or so, United communicated an update to its process to more clearly identify pets traveling in-cabin (see #3).
Eleven months ago, United provided a statement within 24 hours in response to a video of a passenger being forcibly removed from a flight. The statement placed blame on the customer and attempted to direct the focus away from the actual incident by calling it an “overbook situation.”
After a public uproar, United issue another statement later the same day, this time apologizing to the other passengers, noting a review was underway and that they were reaching out to the impacted passenger. Also an employee email from the CEO shared with the media further exacerbated the situation by describing the passenger as, “disruptive and belligerent.”
Looking to the key tenets, at the outset United was not transparent and did not take accountability. The company was responsive to the adverse reaction to each communication, unfortunately compounding it by still not being transparent or taking accountability.
A day later, United came through on tenet #4. The airline finally took full responsibility, apologized and committed to a review of policies, with a deadline – although the apology was to “the customer,” instead of using his name. The CEO also did a live interview in which he again apologized, this time using the customer’s name, detailed the steps of the review and admitted to the harsh learning experience.
Both situations are horrible – no words or actions can change that. United deserves some credit for eventually getting it right a year ago. However, the quick and transparent communication and action in response to the dog’s death this week was well-handled from the outset.
[author]About the Author: Christine has been a strategic communications and marketing consultant for more than 20 years. Since joining LPP in 1994, Christine has led successful corporate positioning initiatives, thought leadership and competitive response programs, and company and product introductions for emerging companies, large global publicly-held brands and everything in between. She leads the agency’s crisis communications practice, providing strategic counsel to companies on preparing for and effectively handling issues and crises. [/author]
