Goodbye forever – how airline passengers have responded to poor customer service with boycotts

​It is said that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary must be questioning that mantra at the moment.  Hundreds of cancelled flights – the result of an error in calculating holiday rotas – has led to legions of former customers pledging to boycott the airline.

However, the successful Irish carrier is not the only airline that has faced calls for a boycott.

United Airlines attracted criticism when a passenger was rather unceremoniously removed from one of its flights in April, with social media users calling for air travellers to vote with their feet and avoid the airline.

One diabetic Wizz Air customer refuses to fly with the airline after she was charged a fee to carry her insulin pen onto the aircraft.  Six months (and plenty of correspondence) later, Wizz Air had not refunded the cost and the customer now chooses to pay more for her airline tickets to fly with another airline.  By refusing a small refund, the Hungarian low-cost operator has potentially lost thousands of pounds in future revenue.

Similarly, some former British Airways customers now go out of their way to avoid flying with what was once justifiably styled as ‘the world’s favourite airline’.  One former customer even chooses to take an indirect flight rather than fly direct with British Airways, such was her disappointment in the customer experience.

MSB’s roots lie in the aviation sector, and throughout our 30 years in business we have helped international airlines and airports take their customer experience to the next level.  To learn more about our work in this sector, you can read the aviation case studies on our new website.

​This article was based on a piece first published on bbc.co.uk, which can be found here.