An airline should never declare a holiday during a holiday!
The season for travelling is bestowed upon us once again (Chinese New Year), and a certain airline has proudly advertised its own out-of-office notice publicly on Twitter:
Just the other day, I was lamenting at how many of the retail outlets in Hong Kong (with the exception of the most traditional of establishments) remain open during the Chinese New Year public holidays, a sight that is rarely seen if we were to turn the clock back twenty-plus years or so. It’s a time of celebration with family — and in Chinese culture, this is the one time of the year when individuals make the effort to get together.
However, when an organisation has the responsibility of providing commercial air transportation for customers, a holiday period is a time when peak performance becomes both the service target and expected result.
Not in the case for Tigerair Singapore, apparently.
My ensuing thought process, presented through two separate tweets:
First and foremost, it is inappropriate to declare time-off during a period when business is supposedly booming. For airlines, holiday periods of celebratory nature is when they have an excuse to charge exorbitant fares, low-cost carrier or not — and paying travellers will have come to accept this reality one way or another.
While Tigerair Singapore did include a link to a web page, which included telephone contact details and operating hours for the respective hotlines, the tweet subtly declared a complete disregard for the importance of social media as a means of providing necessary customer support-slash-engagement.
Hence, those who travel with Tigerair will find themselves needing to utilise more-traditional means of contacting the airline should it become necessary. That’s not to say Tigerair is really any good in dealing with social media based enquiries and support requests under normal, every-day circumstances.
It saddens, and disappoints, me to see evidence of service industry providers — in this case, airlines — who either still struggle with appreciating the true value of social media integration where the overall communications and support workflow is concerned, or simply choose the path of ignorance when it comes to possibly establishing a broader reach with its customers and its market.
Kinny tweets aviation, social media and technology on Twitter.
