Corporate Apologies: American Airlines

After American Airlines' inspection incident and its hundreds of flight cancellations, the airline's CEO had no choice but to make a public apology. In sensitive situations such as this, an apology can make or break a company, affecting its customers perception and their loyalty to American Airlines.


http://conversationstarter.hbsp.com/2008/04/american_airlines_communicatio.html


Pasted above is a link to an article written analyzing AA's strategies and its numerous apologies. In it, the author talks about the significance of timeliness. Take bloggers like you and me for instance. People stranded at airports with laptops were able to blog and report on the incident within minutes of finding out their flights were canceled. Granted, AA couldn't issue an apology that quickly, but it took them a while to provide an adequate response. Posting press releases and sending mass e-mails to valued customers just isn't good enough.

Another poor planning issue was that the VP of Marketing was the first one to issue apologies via e-mail. People want to hear a sincere apology from the CEO or highest ranked person in the company.

Lastly, when AA's CEO did apologize, "he didn’t apologize for the inconvenience to customers, just for his failure to ensure safety standards are met.”

It sounds like AA wasn't prepared to handle a crisis such as this with an good crisis communications plan. For such a large and public company, that is unacceptable.