Reading Response Week 4

I’ve read some blogs posted in www.jetbluehostage.com and I think some of them are just unbelievable. I just kept thinking to myself, ‘why can’t these people get over this?’ Nobody got hurt – you were just got stuck in a full airplane for hours, and yes there may not have been any food except for maybe peanuts or chips, it was cold outside (but you should have known to dress warmly since it was winter time), you probably would have seen it coming already from watching the weather forecast that there were going to be a winter storm hitting the Northeast. You knew in a bad weather, the chance planes might get cancelled or delayed are really high. But you took your risk anyway; you choose to fly that day. Now who’s to blame after all? It was purely your free will and decision that you got on a plane on such a busy day like Valentine’s Day and to top it off there was a winter storm coming. Now that your plane got delayed, you got very angry with the airline and you swore you would never forget this day.

At first when I started to read about these passengers that got stranded for hours inside an airplane, I felt really bad for them. But then as I read more and more, I found out that some people were just very bitter about it and they couldn’t just move on. In my opinion, JetBlue has really went above and beyond to deal with the Valentine’s Day incident aftermath. David Neeleman had done a fantastic job on keeping the company together and went out to public apologizing for all of the trouble his company had caused. Many other CEOs would have run if they were faced with the same situation. David humbly took the blame and compensated the passengers with full refunds and free roundtrip tickets right away. What else could you ask for?

I realize that in writing my letter, I would mostly deal with these angry, bitter passengers. I realize that JetBlue cannot give each passenger the lost time waiting in the airport or inside the planes, but JetBlue still took the action to spend $35Million to compensate them. In writing my letter, I am planning to first apologize, address the issue, lay out the plans that JetBlue has done or will do in order to prevent similar incidents from happening again, once again apologize for everything then also mention that there would be monetary compensations to each passengers that were directly impacted by the incident. I think while some people are understanding and forgiving, some are just not that type. No matter how good of a letter you write apologizing to them, they’ll never going to be happy and will always be the ones who spend their time writing blogs or posting videos online about your once in a lifetime mistake.