Gulliver | Giving airlines the bird

American carriers are much better at dealing with Twitter complaints than European ones

Travellers are increasingly turning to Twitter to lodge complaints with airlines. But before angrily whipping out an iPad, it is worth considering one important factor: the continent on which the offending firm is based.

By A.W. | WASHINGTON, DC

FRUSTRATED by long wait times on the phone and inadequate responses at airport counters, travellers are increasingly turning to Twitter to lodge complaints with airlines. But before angrily whipping out an iPad while stuck in a departure lounge, it is worth considering one important factor: the continent on which the offending carrier is based.

For those travelling on an American airline, the chances of a fast response are good—much faster, in some cases, than over the phone or in person. But for those using a European carrier, it may be better to stick to the old-fashioned ways of demanding service.

A new report from Conversocial, a social-media customer-service firm, looks at how responsive airlines are to tweets. And while there are stark discrepancies among individual airlines, the most striking thing is the chasm between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

If you tweet at a North American airline, you are likely to get a response in one hour and five minutes on average, according to the report. And a European airline? Be prepared to wait more than three times that long: three hours and 40 minutes. The fastest responder to tweets in North America is Alaska Airlines, which replies in a barely believable average of two minutes and 34 seconds. Europe’s fastest is Lufthansa, which takes 12 minutes and 45 seconds on average to get back to customers.

The Conversocial report follows one released in March by Stratos Jet Charters, an Orlando-based air charter firm, which ranked the Twitter responsiveness of airlines around the world using a slightly different methodology. According to that study, the fastest-responding airline was Mexican budget carrier Volaris, followed by JetBlue and Etihad Airways. No European carrier made the top five.

None of this is to say that American airlines are universally responsive. Spirit Airlines, which responds to tweets using a robot, takes an average of five hours and 46 minutes to answer customers, according to the report. But that’s still far better than the slowest European airline, easyJet, which requires a whopping 16 hours and 50 minutes to get back to tweeters.

European airlines’ slow response times certainly aren’t due to an excessive volume of Twitter requests. North American airlines are bombarded with about 40% more customer tweets every hour than their European counterparts. But the report suggests this higher volume may actually give the American carriers an advantage, since they build up social media response infrastructure that their European peers lack. United Airlines, for example, had two dozen employees devoted to social media last year. (Even so, it still struggles to respond to tweets promptly; its 37% response rate within an hour is the lowest among the big American airlines. But it’s still far better than British Airways’ atrocious 4%.)

Twitter metrics might soon be an outdated way of tracking airlines’ social media responsiveness. As the report notes, the platform has been overtaken in recent years by apps and services such as Instagram, Facebook Messenger and, particularly, WhatsApp, which has more than a billion active users to Twitter’s 313m. In the future, communication with airlines could move to private messaging, rather than Twitter’s public exchanges. That might have the advantage of a more substantive conversation between airlines and customers, while still allowing travellers to respond at their convenience while en route. But it has two drawbacks. First, customers will no longer be able to rely on the public shaming of an airline to ensure swift recompense. That will reduce the incentive for carriers to be contrite. Second, It will be much harder to track airlines’ response rates in studies like these.

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