American Airlines announced on Twitter and on Facebook that they’ve joined Snapchat under the username AmericanAir.
While they’ve long provided customer service via social channels, American spokesperson Barbara DeLollis explains that they’ve “established a channel to learn and connect with our potential audience” rather than providing customer service on snapchat.
Apparently the first airline to use Snapchat was Aer Lingus, only last year. Since then Air New Zealand, Wow Air, and Virgin America (at a minimum) have joined.
One recent “snapisode” on Wow’s account depicted a day in the life of flight crew flying from Reykjavik to Baltimore, complete with complaints about the weather and a flight attendant donning a horse head mask to welcome passengers. The airline has even gone so far as to introduce an official “face” of the channel, Icelandic personality “Do More Asgeir”, who describes himself as “just some dude on a mission of exploring and doing more in Iceland!” Snap after snap, Asgeir takes viewers on little adventures around his country and even flew Wow’s route to Berlin to share how to spend a fun, affordable weekend in the German city.
The medium offers the possibility to connect visually and share live events with a younger demographic. In other words, you wouldn’t normally reach me on Snapchat. That I’m now going to download it because several airlines have signed on probably means I’m doing it wrong.
(HT: Demetrius John)
so….. AA has joined a vacuous app (aimed at teenage kids) where stuff on the screen is ephemeral ?
Says it all really – the info on the screen is as short lived as their customer care…
AA = Attention Absence
AA = Allegiance Absence
AA = Award Absence
AA discriminates against its us citizens employees (cuban born citizens to acquiesce the castro communist dictatorship. Besides not having air marshals either.
When doing business with Cuba, all those American Airlines employees of Cuban origin Fernandez heralded in his speech don’t have the same rights as their U.S.-born counterparts, or their Latin-American counterparts, or their counterparts born anywhere else in the world for that matter.
The first “historic” flight to Varadero brought home the point.
A Cuban-born crew member arrived without a Cuban passport — required for anyone born there who left the country after 1970, even as babies — and a brouhaha ensued with Cuban authorities on the ground. The crew member was not allowed entry, much less the required overnight rest stop after a crew member flies 12 hours.
Questions were posed by AA to authorities: What happens in the future if there’s a flight with a mechanical delay and the crew that includes a Cuban American is grounded overnight? What will happen, routinely, with the two Varadero flights that require the overnight stay of the crew?
The answer: Only in the most “extenuating circumstances” would Cuba allow an exception to its separate set of archaic travel requirements for Cuban Americans. No overnights for Cuban-American crew members. Period.
Now the airline, which makes its schedules far from Cuban politics in Texas, had to identify Cuban-American employees and take them off Cuba flights that required an overnight stay.
“Please remember that those who are Cuban born should be removed with pay from Cuba flights until we can verify what requirements the Cuban government has for these crewmembers,” says an AA memo to managers that a source shared with me.
And I have to ask: Can you imagine in your company a staffing memo that says, “Please remember that those who are Israeli born should be removed?”
Or, please remember that those who are (fill in the blank any other place of origin) should be removed?
The Cuban government’s long arm is cherry-picking the assignments of employees of an American company. How is that for a historic development?