Thanks to David Parker Brown, I was alerted to a security situation on American Airlines flight 24 (AA24), bound to New York from San Francisco as someone had called in a threat to the jetliner. Thankfully, within a few hours all passengers had de-planed and gone through security checks and no one was hurt.
Crises Management 2.0 – Live on Twitter!
While the situation was unfolding, there were at least two passengers (@cmckella & @jaysears) on board the airplane who were tweeting away regular updates of the situation from their perspective, which included photos of the cabin and cops around the aircraft. Soon enough, major newspapers and news channels were quoting these two for the most current information about what’s happening on-board the aircraft.

Though, it wasn’t long till American Airlines’s Twitter account (@aairwaves) jumped into the middle of the arena and took on the queries head-on. It seemed like they had read our infographic on crises handling through social media (see below), because AA did a good job at it.
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This is a guest post by Jonathan Haysom, who is a respected marketer and business development strategist. Currently working for Australia’s number 1 telco and number 1 company by brand value, he is responsible for maintaining and growing a multi-billion dollar product portfolio focused on next generation products. He has recently received awards for innovation in marketing and accolades for his social media campaigns and brand strategies.

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Virgin Blue, after fighting hard as a “renegade” brand for a slice of the Australian carrier market is tipped to undergo a marketing face lift and re-invent itself as a full service brand. Some of the purported changes include the introduction of a new business class product, integrating the other brand properties (Polynesian Blue and V Australia) as well as the introduction of wide body aircraft on trunk routes between capitals.

(Image credit: ABC News)

Virgin Blue going upscale?
It is apparent from the changes the new CEO, Ex Qantas Senior exec John Borghetti is primarily going after the lucrative corporate segment of the market, one which Virgin Blue has traditionally struggled to break into due to Qantas’ having a …

We all know what happened when the volcano in Iceland erupted and resulted in utter chaos in the aviation world. We also saw how some airlines and aviation authorities around the world struggled to cope with servicing the customers, while others used the latest social media tools to engage and update them.

At SimpliFlying, we saw a paradigm shift in the way airlines handle crises management, in the age of social media. Instead of writing an article on it, we put together an info-graphic, that details the five key steps for managing crises, in the wake of the volcanic eruption. Both a PDF version, and a PPT version are available for download and printing. An Apple Keynote version will be available soon.

Please feel free to share it with your colleagues, print it out or use it in your presentations, as long as full credit is given to SimpliFlying.

Special thanks to Steve Frischling for help with the content, and Arno Ghelfi for the design.
Infographic – Five steps to successful crisis managment for airlines, in the age of social media [PDF]
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Last weekend, as United and Continental announced their plans to merge, I was answering a flurry of emails from journalists on quotable quotes about the merger. Some of them made it to leading newspapers like USA Today and FinanceAsia. Thanks to Dan Reed and Ed Russell respectively for the quote.

Though, too often, quotes in the press are either truncated, or lost in translation. Hence, here I share with you many more quotes I had been asked for, and sent out to various press outlets. I think they give a unique insight into the United/Continental merger.

On the brand change to United: Though both brands are globally recognized, I personally would have preferred to see the Continental brand survive, because they’ve done a fantastic job of resurrecting the brand over the years, while United has struggled with its re-branding efforts. As long as the name change doesn’t degrade Continental’s product or service, I think customers would be happy to move on.

On the executive appointments: It’s good for the airline in the long term, that Jeffery Smisek becomes the key executive, because he has …

For the first time on the web (and in English!), in this exclusive interview with SimpliFlying, we hear directly from the horse’s mouth. Aurelie Valtat was the person leading Eurocontrol’s much talked-about ashcloud response, and personally helped out thousands of stranded passengers using social media.

On April 14, 2010, the eruption of the Icelandic volcano [i still can't pronounce the name!] resulted in chaos — more than 100,000 flight cancellations between April 15 and 21 — affecting millions of travelers, and the fallout cost the airline industry $1.7 billion. The silver lining was social media – and how airlines and authorities reached out to stranded passengers to help them out. And Eurocontrol led from the front. Eurocontrol’s efforts were much admired on this blog, and on other leading websites like Mashable.

In my conversation with Aurelie, she spoke at length about how she handled the tasks, challenges encountered and lessons learnt. Below is a summary of the exclusive video interview (Click here if you’re unable …

Note: This article and slideshow, created by me, was first published on Mashable.com.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers scrambled to find alternative modes of transportation, last minute hotel bookings and even home-stays when the Icelandic volcano disrupted air travel around Europe over the last seven days. The official figure for airlines’ losses stands at $1.7 billion in just six days, with U.K.-based airlines British Airways and Virgin Atlantic likely to suffer the most.

Though it sounds like all doom and gloom, the silver lining of this crisis is that a lot of travelers looked to social media for help, and airlines and other authorities actually rose to the challenge. Here are some examples of winning information and customer service strategies that were implemented via social media.
Deep dive into social media for airlines
As I highlighted in-depth in my previous article, EuroControl was very impressive as they rushed to update passengers about the latest information about flights through a variety of online and offline mediums.

In just seven days, there were over 55,000 mentions of #ashtag, and the usage was so …

Today, a number of airline accounts were hacked. First, NYC Aviation pointed out that United Airlines was sending out malicious tweets. Later, I received a Direct Message from Brussels Airlines, with exactly the same message, with the URL taking users to a sexual enhancement website.

Staying true to the real-time nature of social media, within minutes, the news of hacking was doing rounds all over the internet. Of course, it’s only to be expected, when United Airlines sends an abnormal Tweet to it’s 56,000 followers. Though United later removed the specific Tweet, the damage was done.

Reversing the brand damage to the airlines, in 3 steps
This is a situation that any airline jumping on the social media bandwagon can face. So, what’s the best way to deal with it? Here are three simple steps.

Be quick. Delete the malicious tweets from your updates (obvious!), but do it quickly. United Airlines took 1 hr 6 mins before their public tweet was …

This article was first published on the CNBC blog———-Qantas announced today a net profit after tax of A$58 million for the first half of the financial year, down from $210 million a year earlier, although the airline did recover from a loss in the second-half of last financial year. This 72% dip in profits resulted in the shares falling by up to 7.2% in early morning trades. However, Alan Joyce, the CEO, says the carrier has done better than most of its rivals. And it has, indeed, thanks to its agility.Agility through smart cost-cuttingAlthough revenues dipped by 13.4%, costs were slashed by 16.2%, which shows Qantas’ diligence and discipline in reducing expenditure in the past year. The cutting of frequencies to unpopular routes and grounding of older aircrafts was key to these cost savings.Load-factors have been the highest in five years – at 82.4%, on flights that carried a lesser number of total passengers as compared to the past year.This simply means that flights were more full than in the past, despite the recession. Of course, the downside was that this was achieved by …

So you’ve got a sizeable social media presence for your airline over the past year. And now, the employees are starting to participate too. But there’s a constant tug of war, between Legal, Corp. Comms and Marketing – on how employees should and shouldn’t participate in social media. The solution? An airline-wide social media policy. What is a social media policy, you ask?  Basically, it addresses the concerns that many airlines have when getting started in social media… What if an employee says something they shouldn’t?  How do we respond to passenger complaints and compliments?  How can we possibly control what our employees are doing online?  If you’ve been up and running on social media for a few months, it’s time you formalize your thoughts in this area, and ensure everyone at the airline is on the same page.  Here are five key imperatives for your social media policy:   1. Explain the Scope in User-Friendly Terms When you say “social media policy” to many of your employees, they may think “that doesn’t apply to me because I’m not in Marketing.”  So, it’s important for your policy to explain what types of activities it covers, possibly including their personal Facebook …

So, we all know that Japan Airlines has filed for bankruptcy, is de-listing from the Nikkei Stock Exchange, will be selling all 30 Boeing 747s, shedding 30% of their staff and has hired a new CEO who used to be a monk. But what is the impact of all this? And where does a potential deal with Delta Airlines and Skyteam fit in the scheme of things? What happens to Oneworld? I answered these questions and more during my Live interview with CNBC’s Worldwide Exchange today. I’m sharing the 5 min interview video below and would love to hear your thoughts on my take. (Click here if you cannot view the video)