Update: The article now includes two bonus points, specifically addressing Hurricane Irene! (thanks to Vinay Bhaskara for those)

On August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene hit the US East Coast, all the way up to New York City! Just prior to that, on August 23rd, an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter Scale hit the US east coast. It shook the nation’s Capital and was felt strongly in New York but luckily not many were hurt. It happened just hours after the strongest earthquake in Colorado in 40 years, and one in Colombia. Airports in NYC, DC, Virginia were shut down and power and cellphone lines cut. So while people couldn’t make calls or receive them, they could send text messages, tweet, post on Facebook and in other social networks and fuel all kinds of hot debates.

We reached out to our partner, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com and asked him for a guest article on what to do in such a situation, when a crisis hits a region not well prepared to deal with it. Hence, here is the guest article by Philippe, which provides Top 10 tips on what to do if you’re stuck at an airport after …

Editor’s Note: A day before I spoke about putting the joy back into the airport experience at the Annual ACI Conference in Lisbon, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com suggested that he wanted to write a guest article as a follow up to his earlier ‘How to empower stranded travelers‘. We decided that that the next article could be on how to help airports turn stranded travelers into happy consumers. Hence, here is the guest article by Philippe.

This is a very challenging question since, by definition, stranded travelers are in a difficult situation, often far away from home, in a difficult environment where uncertainty is high. Stranded travelers are usually left on their own, airport and airline officials have often no answer to provide because of the inherent uncertain nature of the event and are limited in what they can do to help travelers at a loss for helping the travelers.

The following items may not work for everyone, everywhere. However, they show various directions that will need to be customized and modified according to the specifications of the location, the needs of the travelers and various other parameters.

Let us assume several assumptions to start with:

We are talking about stranded …

Last week, had the honor of presenting at the ACI Europe Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. While the city had beautiful weather, I addressed the audience of mainly airport CEOs and Commercial Heads on how to engage customers when the weather goes bad – in times of crises. I used a number of examples, from the Icelandic ashcloud to American Airlines flight 24 crises handling.

Here’s the presentation I delivered in Lisbon, the key point being that airlines and airports must use the same tools as their customers to communicate effectively and efficiently today.
 

Social Media Crises Management for airlines and airport on Prezi

In summary, I think here’s a picture that tells us what the future of crises management in aviation is going to be like (thanks to Aurelie Valtat for …

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….

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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