Legal Marketing & PR

Response to a comment: "It is not the airline's fault."

By Larry Bodine

A comment on my blog states, "Airlines are not obligated to furnish accommodations on weather related issues. It is not their fault."

Baloney.

I know the airlines are not required to give a stranded passenger a room when a cancellation is due to the weather. That's not the point.  They should provide lodging because it's good customer service. It's just not right to strand people in an airport far from home and blow them off. They should do the right thing without being told to.

Similar hard-nosed tactics brought the credit card companies brand new federal regulations to prevent them from mistreating their customers. They were mean to their customers and the government passed laws against it.

To focus on my own profession, if all law firms were to be hostile to their clients, they would soon find themselves regulated by the Federal Trade Commission.  The bar is viewed as a self-protecting guild as it is. If law firms follow the heartless path of the airlines, there will be government regulation, and not the nice kind.

I predict heavy regulation will return to the airlines. Then there would be no more scenes of airports with hundreds of people sleeping on the floor. People will refuse to tolerate it. Passengers will pressure the government to pass legislation requiring airlines to put stranded people up for the night. 

If the airlines bleat that they can't afford it, the government should just nationalize them. The airlines have been doing such a terrible job of customer service for so many decades, they don't deserve to be in business.

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on February 02, 2011 (boomark / email).