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Badvocacy On Board

A terrific but frightening badvocacy story appeared in the Financial Times yesterday in Lucy Kellaway’s highly read column. She could be classified as a badvocate but one could more easily argue that EasyJet, the European low cost carrier,  was the true “bad” advocate. As she tells it, she booked six tickets to Menorca for the holidays last March. She never received the confirmation from EasyJet and soon found out that they misplaced her reservation. What to do? She reordered. However to her surprise, EasyJet billed her twice (and those tickets add up to a tidy sum).  She corresponded with their Customer Service department and it went from swell to hell fast. The story just continues to get worse with the repaid check from EasyJet getting lost in the mail and her email to them letting them know she covers customer service for the FT ignored. When she got a response, EasyJet apologized for the inconvenience but communicated that there was nothing they could do about the poor trail of customer service woes. Kellaway writes: “Yet as a journalist, I commend EasyJet. Making it almost impossible for me to have my money back is entirely sensible. The company has destroyed my goodwill, but my goodwill doesn’t matter. The reason I chose to fly with them wasn’t that I like them. It was that they were slightly cheaper and the timing suited me better than the competition.” Nothing worse than an angry customer and especially one that is also an influential journalist! What was EasyJet thinking? How does this story end? Someone at EasyJet finally figured out that making nice with Kellaway was preferable than her earning her disdain. She received an apologetic email from EasyJet saying she would get her money back after all. I bet that she will not be a fan of EasyJet for a long time.