Emirates, Qatar and Royal Jordanian - Airlines React To United Express Flight 3411

Emirates, Qatar and Royal Jordanian - Airlines React To United Express Flight 3411

Readers will need no introduction to United’s recent crisis, when David Dao suffered injuries after being forcibly dragged from United Express Flight 3411. This made news worldwide to the point that the incident now even has its own Wikipedia entry.

A number of airlines have since jumped on the back of this to produce their own marketing campaigns in response to United’s misfortunes, in particular Emirates, Qatar Airways and Royal Jordanian.

Royal Jordanian has featured prominently in past issues for award-winning campaigns where they trolled Donald Trump and his Muslim ban. In the same spirit, the airline released two tweets, one had a smoking ban image with the words ‘Dragging is strictly prohibited’ accompanied by the hashtag #United. A second one had a smiling pilot with the words, “our pilots happily welcome you on board.”

Qatar Airways made a joke about United’s smartphone app supporting a ‘drag and drop feature’, by changing the description of its own app to read - “doesn’t support drag and drop. We take care of our customers as we unite them with their destination.’

The biggest splash of all was made by Emirates which produced a short video ad, sent out by social media.

This simultaneously celebrated the fact that Tripadvisor had chosen Emirates as its airline of the year and mocked United CEO Oscar Munoz for calling the Gulf carriers ‘not real airlines.’

The video highlighted that Emirates was selected for having both the World’s best economy and first class cabin, before showing images of the Emirates flight experience. The social media ad then changed United’s ‘Fly the Friendly Skies’ motto into ‘Fly the Friendly Skies….This Time For Real.’

As it appeared on social media and used stock footage, the Emirates video will have cost very little to produce.

Yet at time of writing it had been retweeted over 10,000 times, reaching according to Tweetreach 518,000 individual Twitter users. It also generated global media coverage, with Bloomberg, The Daily Mail and the Chicago Tribune being just some of the outlets to devote articles to it.

Following the incident SimpliFlying has decided to boycott United Airlines for the foreseeable future. In a video CEO Shashank Nigam explained that this decision is due to United’s poor customer service record through the years, culminating in what happened on Flight 3411.

In a follow-up video, Shashank Nigam commended United for some of the operational steps it has taken in response to the incident, but pointed out that communications and social media are still areas that need to be addressed.

Key Take-Away

Capitalising on another brand’s PR disaster is always risky. Emirates was able to do it because of consistently high customer satisfaction scores, and because it could link back to previous disparaging comments about it from Oscar Munoz.

Before trying something like this, question whether your brand will stand up to similar scrutiny and whether there are any skeletons in your closet that an enterprising journalist could unearth.

Needless to say, never do something like this if there is actual loss of life involved.

This is what London Luton Airport did several years ago. The airport used a photo of a Chicago plane crash on Facebook to illustrate the fact that it could deal with any snow problems, leading to the airport receiving extensive negative news coverage and having to make multiple public apologies.