All Over Again

Anyone who had Internet access in 2009 probably remembers the curious case of Dave Carroll, and how United Airlines both broke his guitar and then stonewalled him about paying for his repair bills for the better part of a year. The You Tube music video he made about the experience (“United Breaks Guitars”) got over a million hits in about four days, dropped United’s stock price by over 10% (a hit of about $180 million USD), and raised a huge amount of public awareness for Carroll and his band – and for Taylor, the company that made the guitar in question. It also answered the question – if anyone was still not clear on this – of why good customer service, public relations and loss prevention are important. You would probably expect that any company not run by people with the intelligence of squirrels would have taken a $180 million lesson to heart; however, if you’ve been reading the newspapers or this space, you would already know that this was not what happened…

About a year later, Mr. Carroll, now on a speaking tour about his experiences with United, had to fly on that airline again – whereupon they promptly lost his luggage again. It’s highly doubtful that this was a deliberate act of revenge; given the company’s original response to both the loss claim and the video (which has been viewed over 12 million times as of this writing) it seems unlikely that they could have successfully organized that sort of vendetta against a single customer, even if it wouldn’t have been idiotic of them to try. But even if United didn’t learn anything from this experience (the company says it did, but I have my doubts) you still might reasonably expect other companies within the industry to learn from someone else’s $180 million mistake – except that doesn’t appear to have happened either…

According to a story appearing on the Yahoo! News site, a musician named Dave Schneider was traveling from Buffalo to Detroit on Delta Airlines when he was told he would have to check his vintage 1965 Gibson guitar – despite the fact that he offered to buy an extra ticket for the instrument, and despite the fact that Congress passed a law last year making it possible for musicians to do just that. And, sure enough, the airline personnel managed to get the Gibson caught in a “mobile service elevator” at the gate, smashing its case and doing about $1,800 worth of damage to the instrument itself. The airline then repeated United’s second mistake as well, stonewalling the musician for months before the story turned up on line and was remarked (and mocked) by millions of scruffy bloggers world-wide…

Now, I’m not suggesting that every musical instrument checked by an airline is going to be seriously damaged; I’m not even suggesting that this is something that happens more than once every three or four years. What I am suggesting is that if I am taking responsibility for property worth in excess of $10,000 – and especially if I am doing so in defiance of Federal law, public relations, and all common sense – that I would take better care of it than if it was a $2 trinket from K-Mart. And if I ran any kind of transportation company I would have a better policy for lost, damaged and stolen luggage than “stonewall them for a year or two and hope they give up and go away…”

The truth is that world-changing business developments don’t always have thousands of jet engines, millions of viewers, or billion-dollar IPOs. Whether they meant to or not, Dave Carroll and United Airlines between them have changed the way we look at air travel, property damage, customer service, and public perception – and it’s past time everyone else who does business with the general public should have started paying attention to those changes…