2000 Dwayne D. Gremler

1
Service Watch

• Author Susan Carey
• Title Fliers Assert Rights After Runway
  Ordeal
• Publication Wall Street Journal
• Volume CXL
• Number 13
• Date January 15, 1999
• Pages B1, B4

2
Fliers Assert Rights After Runway Ordeal (by
Susan Carey)

• Summary of major points
• Northwest Airlines passengers were stranded for
  several hours at Detroit airport in the planes
• some as much as 11 hours
• no food, water, or working toilets
• passengers could not smoke, use cellular phones,
• some could not walk around and were charged for
  alcoholic beverages
• Northwest chose (for safety reasons) not to send
  buses out to the planes to rescue the passengers

3
Fliers Assert Rights After Runway Ordeal (by
Susan Carey)

• Summary of major points (continued)
• Northwests attempt to make up for the
  inconvenience caused to customers has included
• an apology to all customers inconvenienced
• those who were delayed on the ground for more
  than 2.5 hours were sent a free domestic
  round-trip ticket
• a class-action lawsuit was filed on 1/7/99
  against Northwest, the Detroit airport, and Wayne
  County (who owns the airport)
• part of the issue is being held hostage and
  that there were not contingency plans in place to
  handle such a situation

4
Key Services Marketing Concepts

• service failure
• bad weather triggered the problems
• poor decisions and contingency plans made the
  situation much worse
• service recovery
• very poor recovery strategy
• creating captive customers was not appropriate
• customer advocates
• Northwest has created customer terrorists
• customers are not only upset, they have gone to
  the extreme of suing the company