"Man, that sucks, but let me tell you about my flight that sucked more."

An exasperating (and thankfully brief) look at online airline operations discourse

We don’t jump into the social media world very often, but when we do, we are inevitably hit with someone’s complaint about a current or recent flying experience. On its face, the act of posting one’s horror story seems like a natural emotional reaction that at its best is meant to cajole the offending airline into remediating the situation, and at its worst is a self-absorbed, “pity my terrible situation” plea for attention.

What sticks out to us most, though, is the reaction. If these posts are meant to engender pity from other users, they are failing. Instead, they only seem to start a tedious game of one-upsmanship. Let’s take a look at a recent post critical of our friends at Air Canada:

Now this seems pretty typical of what we see online, some version of: “You guys are the worst, give me my money back, give me my money back for other stuff I paid for, and I will never fly you again.” ¹

Instead of getting back sympathy or tips on how best to handle the situation, the responses are more typical of Kaleb’s “They are the worst,” or Vivian’s “Same!” The thread continues mostly with other people’s horror stories, interspersed with a few “quit complaining” style jibes along with “the government needs to solve this issue” type salvos.²

Now, if you’re an airline, why would you jump into this mess? Yes, there is a legitimate complaint here, but no amount of online engagement is going to help this situation. Still, kudos to the airlines that do interact — our friends at American are pretty consistent in their outreach on platforms like X, even when the discourse is particularly heated.

How do you respond to Dakota? Well, AA is really doing the best they can here, but even then, it’s not good enough. Let’s see how other travelers have responded to their response.

Nice.

Airlines mess up. They often mess up big time. People miss important events and the customer compensation is often stingy. Now, there may have been a time where the online complaint held extra weight in the nascent days on the internet.³ But now? We’re surprised that anyone answers at all.

1. As we’ve said before, this is almost always untrue

2. We are not airline apologists, but there is no solving summer thunderstorms parked over a major hub

3. We were often in Atlanta during the infamous “Save SkyMiles” initiative on Flyertalk — that seemed like an Oxford style debate compared to today