Another airline has given in to the powers of Twitter. This time, it’s Delta that has brought its customer service to Twitter in a big way, and that’s great news. It’s not quite where it needs to be, but hopefully they’ll realize that quickly and fix it.

When you have travel problems, you can now Tweet them to @DeltaAssist. The airline says this is a pilot program, but it’s pretty robust for being just that. There are five people monitoring the account and responding to all sorts of issues. Sounds great, right? One problem. It’s not manned 24/7.

For now, the account is active only Monday through Friday from 8a to 930p Eastern Time. That’s not good enough. This is the largest airline in the world, and it runs 24 hours a day. To not have anyone on the weekend is a tremendous issue. Not having someone in the overnight hours fails to recognize that there are a lot of flights operating around the world during that time. To ultimately be successful, they’re going to need to be on the ball all day, every day.

But how have they been doing so far when they are on the clock? Let’s take a look.

I looked at last Friday, June 25. There were a total of 90 tweets sent by the @DeltaAssist account between the time they signed on at 758a and the time they signed off at 953p. I tracked as many of the conversations as I could to see how the response time stacked up. Overall, it was pretty good (though there could have been some that they never responded to that I didn’t see).

I tracked 64 conversations based on the tweets that they sent out on the 25th and divided them into three categories: negative, positive, and questions.

As you can see, Delta did a good job of responding to some tweets very quickly. There were some that didn’t receive a response for a very long time, but to be fair most of those were not urgent. On top of that, it appears that they’re still trying to find their footing. They were responding to questions and complaints written to all Delta Twitter accounts, so I have no doubt there was a large volume of stuff to get through.

Many of those long response times were responded to in the early afternoon, so it’s almost as if they just found a bunch of old tweets. My guess is that there are a bunch of different Delta teams responding to each account (that sounds like Delta to me), so someone probably forwarded a bunch over to the Assist team in the afternoon. They’ll need to get that squared away.

Most importantly, I hope you’ll notice, Delta, that a simple search brought up more than 20 tweets citing “DeltaAssist” between the time you signed off on Friday and Sunday afternoon when I’m writing this. And this is just a couple days after you officially launched it. It’s only going to grow.

The airline is off to a very good start here. Welcome to the world of Twitter customer service, Delta. Now get to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you’ll be in serious business.

Yesterday, the DOT decided to issue a final ruling that will effectively require airlines to have a passenger bill of rights. This includes a 3 hour limit on the amount of time you spend on the ground on a domestic flight. While I’m sure that Kate Hanni and friends are thrilled, I am not.

You can read the full 81 page ruling (PDF) if you’d like, but there is one particular piece I want to focus on today. It’s the requirement that US-based airlines create contingency plans for mid- to large-sized airport operations.

The rule says that every US-based airline that operates planes with more than 30 seats (if those airlines also have smaller planes, those count too) has to create contingency plans that effectively restrict the airlines to the eventual detriment of the passengers. This plan must have the following in it:

• Domestic flights cannot remain on the ramp for more than 3 hours unless there is a safety or security reason or if it “significantly disrupt airport operations.”
• International flights have the same restriction but the time limit is “a set number of hours as determined by the carrier.”
• After two hours, the airline must provide food and potable water.
• Lavatories must work and medical attention must be provide if needed.

What happens if they don’t do this? It will be considered an “unfair and deceptive practice” and that means, according to 49 U.S.C. 41712 that “the Secretary shall order the air carrier, foreign air carrier, or ticket agent to stop the practice or method.” In practice, I’m not entirely clear what this means. Some news outlets are reporting the fine will be $27,500 PER PASSENGER, but to me it seems like it’s $27,500 PER FLIGHT. Obviously there’s a big difference there.

Long tarmac delays suck, right? So why am I against this plan? Let me explain.

Much of this came out of the severe delays that airlines experienced a couple years ago. Kate Hanni was on a thunderstorm-diverted American flight in Texas and the JetBlue Valentine’s Day problems were legendary. Since that time, the airlines have made changes, though it’s going to be nearly impossible to be perfect in this regard when you’re actually thinking about the customer.

This past weekend, we saw a massive storm hit the east coast, and how did the airlines do? Well Delta and JetBlue both informed me that they had no domestic airplanes stuck on the tarmac for more than 3 hours the entire time. (American never responded.) There was one JetBlue flight from St Maarten that actually sat on the ground at JFK for 3 hours and 49 minutes, but that is international so this rule probably wouldn’t have hit it. More importantly, why did that happen?

It’s all because of gate issues. JetBlue and other airlines started pre-canceling a lot of flights, as I noted on BNET yesterday. Obviously the more flights you pre-cancel, the better chance the remaining flights will operate, but it means that there are a lot of airplanes around and shuffling them to make gates available during a blizzard is a tricky thing. You never want to see a plane sitting around for more than 3 hours, but if it’s only one (and JetBlue compensated the passengers), then that’s not too bad for the storm of the decade.

But all this pre-canceling comes at a price. That means there are a lot more people who aren’t getting home for Christmas because so many flights were canceled.

There’s no question that airlines would have had to cancel a lot of flights, but were they more conservative because of public backlash on delays? That’s my guess. Would you rather sit on an airplane for 4 hours or just have your flight canceled? I imagine that some would be happy to sit around for 4 hours if it meant they’d get out of town. Now they find themselves stuck.

But that’s not the only potential problem. Here’s another one. Let’s say that there’s a bad thunderstorm that snarls traffic for the day and your airplane has been inching along the taxiway for about 2 hours and 45 minutes. If that plane won’t be airborne by 3 hours, they have to turn around. It doesn’t matter if they were #1 for departure. Under this rule, the airline will be obligated to turn around and head back to the gate. Now we have a ton of problems – they have to let the passenger off, get the bag out and then get right back in the line at the very end. There is no place-holding allowed. Oh, and there’s a good chance the crew will have had too many hours at that point so they’ll need to find someone else to fly the plane. Now you’ll have a lot of unhappy customers.

“But look at what happened with Continental Express in Minnesota,” you might say. We need to prevent that, right? As I’ve argued before, this won’t do a thing to fix that problem. They tried to get people off the plane, but there were a lot of dumb moves that prevented that from happening. You think that a government law is going to magically change that? It’s not.

Oh, and that two hour rule for providing food and drink? Give me a friggin’ break. Airplanes are allowed to fly all day long without having food, so why do you need to provide food for a 2 hour delay? Water? Yeah, I get that. But food is a whole different beast, and it’s not necessary. Bring your own onboard.

There are a lot of other things in this ruling here as well, but most of those are worthless. Airlines have to disclose on time performance when you book. Ok. That info is readily available to anyone who wants it now. They also have to create a Customer Service Plan with 12 specific points. They already did – about 10 years ago with the Customers First plan. Yawn. I guess this just makes the things they already do into law.

So congratulations, DOT. You’ve created a rule that will do very little good. At least you’ll get some good press for it.

I haven’t commented on the ridiculousness that is Continental #2816 yet, and I’ve received plenty of emails asking me why that hasn’t happened. You know the flight; that’s the one where the passengers got stuck on their little regional jet all night long after diverting from Minneapolis/St Paul to Rochester, Minnesota because of bad weather. I decided to wait to write a post until I could get full information, and I simply couldn’t get it. But now that the initial report is out from the DOT, I’ve got enough to start talking. Surprisingly, it points to Delta Connection carrier Mesaba as the real problem here, though they are denying it.

There’s a lot of finger pointing going on, that’s for sure. Just about everyone originally jumped on ExpressJet (the operator of the Continental Express flight) for not getting people off quickly enough and on Continental for not taking enough responsibility for the flight. Turns out that while they do take some blame, much of it lies on little Mesaba, the regional that’s owned by Delta and the handling agent at the Rochester airport.

In the end, however, the issue not who is at fault in this specific situation but rather the fact that it keeps happening. (There was another one on Sun Country on Friday.) Do we really need a passenger bill of rights to prevent these things? I still say no. Let’s take a look at some of the things people are saying should have happened.

• They were stupid for diverting to Rochester when Continental doesn’t have an operation there. They should have diverted somewhere else.
  
  Sure, that would have made sense. They could have gone elsewhere and handled things their own way, but if you look at the timeline (pdf), they did it for a reason. The original alternate was Madison, Wisconsin, but by switching to Rochester, that would “give the aircraft additional fuel to circle MSP in anticipation of a break in the weather.” It was a gamble that didn’t pay off, but it could have and then everyone would have been happy.




• They should have just left Rochester when they couldn’t get people off the plane.
  
  Easier said than done. They did get refueled in Rochester, so they were ready to takeoff, but the weather just didn’t cooperate. Recordings of the captain (wav) make it sound like she was uncomfortable with flying in that weather even though there might have been a small window. It was the end of a very long day and if she wasn’t comfortable, I wouldn’t have wanted her flying.




• They should have put the passengers on a bus
  
  As we learn in one of the recordings, they tried to get a bus but the bus companies wouldn’t send anything because of flash flooding between Minneapolis and Rochester.




• They should have at least let them into the terminal.
  
  Seriously. They should have. It appears that it wasn’t really ExpressJet’s fault, entirely. There were plenty of communications with the Mesaba people trying to get them off the plane. First Mesaba told them the terminal was closed and they couldn’t send anyone in. Then they said that they couldn’t get a jet bridge and they didn’t have a place for them in the terminal. That’s just awful.




• They should have gone around Mesaba’s local crew and made things happen.
  
  Yes, they should have. The DOT said that it should have been escalated and ExpressJet says the same thing. Senior management should have been alerted so that they could have gotten these people off that plane.




• The passengers should have just gotten off the plane or called 911.
  
  I can’t figure out why this didn’t happen. The door was open, but they couldn’t get any stairs and there was another airplane right nearby. Still, this is only a few feet off the ground, so it would have been a somewhat unsafe drop but not a horrible one. I just would have gotten out of there and taking my chance on getting arrested. I have no idea why everyone sat around all night. Maybe they were all nice Midwesterners.

So did we learn anything? Maybe a little. We definitely learned that crews should escalate the issue as high as possible if it doesn’t get resolved quickly. We also learned that passengers should just walk off the damn plane if they get stuck for that long. But this really was a combination of a bunch of things coming together to screw these poor passengers.

The problem is that this ends up stoking the fire for a government-regulated passenger bill of rights, and I still don’t think that’s going to help. There are plenty of things about this industry that the government doesn’t understand – they’re likely to come up with a bill that makes things worse for everyone. But, if the industry keeps letting crap like this happen, then there isn’t going to be another option.

But what would that have done here? Would Mesaba get fined? That might still happen anyway. Would the passengers magically have been transported off the plane? Not simply because of a law. A federal law probably wouldn’t have changed much here. Continental, for example, already has a policy to get people off the plane after a certain period of time. I think Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said it best.

There was a complete lack of common sense here. It’s no wonder the flying public is so angry and frustrated.

I agree, but can you regulate common sense? I don’t think so. All I know is that the airlines need to take this more seriously.

[Original Images via http://www.flickr.com/photos/madfox/ / CC BY 2.0 and ExpressJet.com]

I’m hijacking my usual “This Week on BNET” post with a brief plug. Minnesota Public Radio puts out a weekly podcast called In the Loop, and I was one of the guests for this week’s production. I usually do interviews on the phone, but this time I went downtown to record in a radio booth where they record NPR’s Marketplace. That means you get to hear my voice in all its crystal-clear glory.

We talked about the latest fun with Ryanair, Wizz Air’s busted promotion, and of course, United breaking guitars. Take a listen for yourself. My piece starts at 18:30 if you want to skip ahead, but it’s a fun show that’s worth listening to the whole way through.

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Over the weekend, US Airways said it would stop charging for soda, water, coffee, and tea on March 1. You’ve probably read about this elsewhere by now, but it’s interesting to think about why they’re finally relenting on something that they held out on for months. It appears that this is a big shift in the US Airways strategy. The airline is now admitting that perception is important, and it is taking some seemingly small but actually big steps to fix their image problem.

In a world where airlines gladly charge for anything they can, US Airways surprisingly went it alone on this drink charge. No other major airline followed the lead to charge for soda and water. The airline resisted changing back despite all the criticism . . . until now. In the words of CEO Doug Parker:

We know customers don’t buy an airline ticket based on whether or not they will get a free soda onboard, but with US Airways being the only large network carrier to charge for drinks, we are at a disadvantage. More importantly, this difference in our service has become a focal point that detracts from all of the outstanding improvements in on-time performance and baggage handling that all of us have worked so hard to achieve over the past year.

This really is a big change, despite what they’re saying. It was just last September that the airline explained how happy it was with the change. President Scott Kirby went so far as to say that the flight attendants would “riot” if they went back to the old way. Talk about a change of direction, huh?

It appears that the airlines reputation and high level of consumer complaints have caused the about-face. US Airways has made excellent strides with its on-time performance lately, and overall reliability has been quite good, yet the airline still ranks toward the bottom of the list when it comes to complaints. In December, for example, US Airways had the second best on-time performance behind perennial leader Hawaiian Airlines. The airline canceled only 2.1% of flights in the very difficult month (poor weather) and reported fewer mishandled bags than the industry average. But when it comes to complaints, the airline finished next to last, just ahead of cellar-dweller United. So what’s going on?

At last year’s media day, the management claimed that they needed to focus on reliability, appearance, and convenience. Apparently, management has now realized that it’s not enough. They actually need to do more than that to keep people happy. They must have been receiving a fair number of complaints about charging for water and soda, so they relented. They’ll lose some money on this, but people will be happier. And that has now strangely become important to them. What a pleasant surprise.

They are also looking to address other sore spots. Instead of just being happy with a strong on time performance, they’ve actually decided they need to tell people about it. This is an airline that has really avoided brand advertising for years. But now they are actually finding some value in it, and they’re promoting their on time performance in several different types of media.

It’s a very interesting move for an airline that had been moving to a true a la carte model and had not put stock in brand advertising for many years. Personally, I would have thought that simply not charging for water would have been plenty. As long as people can get something to drink, they’ll be fine. But US Airways has decided to remove the charges from soda, coffee, and tea as well in order to boost the airline’s image. It will be interesting to see if the consumer complaint number starts to drop after this move.