United takes a drubbing

It must be tough to wake up each morning these days and realize your name is Glenn Tilton and you have to report to work as president and CEO of United Airlines these days.

On the B2B side, you’re under attack from associations and now Congress for your attempt to scrub credit card merchant fees. On the consumer front, a band called Sons of Maxwell has pulled 4.2 million hits on its YouTube video titled “United Breaks Guitars.” Even worse, people are humming the tune that goes with “I should have flown with someone else or gone by car, because United breaks guitars.” Dave Carroll is promising two more songs about his gripe, despite the fact the airline did step up and offer compensation after a year of denials.

Swell. The first one is now selling on iTunes for .99.

Here’s how a few social media experts would advise Mr. Tilton to turn this thing around:

The airline apparently thought it was responding in good humor by saying it intended to use Carroll’s video to train its employees. Not a bad concept, but tin-eared in execution, is Kathryn Hammer’s take.. “Great, break the guy’s pricy guitar, refuse to pay for it, ignore and stonewall the issue for a year, then, when you’re finally called out on it on the national stage, announce you’re helping yourself to his intellectual property. Wince.” Her strategy: Hire Carroll to make the training video along with the CEO and customer service leadership on camera. Pay the songwriter handsomely. It could even go so far as to hire him to do a series of short music videos for the United website, highlighting particular promotions and services, each beginning with, “Hi, I’m Dave Carroll, and United makes me sing.”

Broken guitars = United

For that matter, make Tilton sing about how sorry he is, says Les McKeown, CEO of Predictable Success. If he is tone-deaf, all the better.

Donnetta Campbell would start with a YouTube video announcing a new foundation that gives guitars to underprivileged kids (really do it, she adds) and donate a bunch to pay a penance for the damage. Film the kids with their new guitars and lessons.

In that same vein, Matthew Broder, the communications wizard at Pitney Bowes, suggests a “bands fly free” promotion to established bands that can prove they are traveling to a paid gig. He’d even hire local musicians to set up a jam session at the select United gates.

When bad news goes viral like this, if a company doesn’t respond in the same channels, the audience is left with a negative opinion, points out Carol Warren, a principal at Antarra Communications. If this were her client, she would have already created a song about how United will fix the problem, making sure to poke fun of themselves. Nor would she stop there: regional Twitter email campaigns could clue people in on the best local places to hear music for upcoming flight destinations. She’d run a sweepstakes for folks to post regional music and food tips on Facebook — best tips win free air tickets based on the feedback.

Lots of opportunity

Mario Almonte, the managing partner at Herman and Almonte PR, takes the opposite approach: “The United Breaks Guitar video is too catchy to be taken seriously.  Airlines have always been notorious for losing baggage and destroying their content.  United’s problem is not PR but its business practices,” he says. “ Riders don’t care about United’s business practice.  They only care about their own personal experience.  Give them a good deal and they’ll accept a little bad service.” If the airlines really want to fight fire with fire, they should put out a humorous video showing how annoying and inconsiderate musicians can be on their flights — e.g. taking up an entire overhead bin with their equipment, getting drunk and hitting on the flight attendants.

But no matter the tactic, funny seems to be United’s way out of this mess. After all, as David Moye, the media relations manager at Alternative Strategies, points out, “Explaining their business decisions in a fun way will get the support of consumers, who will forgive anything that’s funny. Think Richard Nixon saying, ‘Sock it to me.’”

Photography: tawalker, fictures, jsome1

Hotels.com has lost another round in it’s bid to register Hotels.com as a trademark, after the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s decision to refuse the registration on the ground that the mark is a ‘generic term’ for hotel information and reservations.

Hotels.com

This decision by the Appeals Court, handed down on July 23, 2009, to affirm the TTAB’s conclusions, effectively makes it very much more difficult to trademark generic terms.

Hotels.com had argued that it does not provide lodging and meals for its users and is not synonymous with the word “hotel”. 

They cited survey evidence as establishing that Hotels.com is widely associated with the company, and is not viewed as a generic term or common name for hotel services. 76% of consumers in the survey responded that they view Hotels.com as a brand name, and not as a generic term.

Hotels.com also clarified that it is not a generic term for a hotel, but is used to indicate an information source and travel agency, and that the mark, viewed in its entirety (with the .com), is not a generic name but an indicator of their services. 

They pointed out that the context in which a term is used is evidence of how the term is perceived by prospective customers, and that the dot-com domain name is a significant aspect of the context of Hotels.com, negating the genericness finding.

All of this comes across as a pretty convincing argument. But unfortunately for them, the TTAB and the Courts say that registrability does not depend on the .com combination.

The TTAB went one step further, and hauled in other websites which include the term ‘hotels’ in their domain name into the argument , including www.all-hotels.com, www.web-hotels.com and www.my-discount-hotels.com.

Citing these websites as evidence, the TTAB said that it “demonstrates a competitive need for others to use as part of their own domain names and trademarks, the term that applicant is attempting to register.”

Seems they’ve been down this road before, and the Appeals Court also had all the answers ready. They cited the case of Lawyers.com as an example. Figures that a site for lawyers would be the first to make a hash of it for everyone who follows.

US House Representatives from Florida and Nevada have asked for an investigation to find out whether a travel blacklist bans government agencies from holding meetings in certain leisure-oriented and holiday resort cities.

Rayburn Building - U.S. House of Representatives

The letter asking for an investigation, signed by five lawmakers from Florida and three from Nevada, was sent to the U.S. Government Accountability office.

It says that “We write to you to request that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) undertake a review of the policies and practices that federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the General Services Administration, use to determine city locations for convening meetings, seminars and conferences within the United States.”

The letter goes on to ask for information about written or unwritten orders that direct agency personnel to avoid meetings and conferences in specific U.S. cities, along with an analysis of the request for proposals issued and proposals accepted by each agency – which would help determine if any U.S. city is being purposely excluded.  

To add to this, Senator Ben Nelson (D-FL) is planning to introduce legislation which would forbid federal agencies from blacklisting any U.S. destination from their travel plans.

All this activity comes after Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) exchange of letters on this subject with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The media exposure and pressure from Congress could push the Obama Administration into issuing some kind of specific directive to all federal agencies making it clear that cities like Las Vegas and Orlando are not off the table.

That should be a relief to federal employees who were probably resigned to never again enjoying the guilty pleasures and attractions in Las Vegas.

The 8 lawmakers who sent the letter asking for an investigation of the travel blacklist are Suzanne Kosmas,  Dina Titus, Corrine Brown, John Mica, Alan Grayson, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Shelley Berkley and Dean Heller.

Rep Alan Grayson (D-FL) has been especially supportive of the travel and tourism sectors, and recently introduced the Paid Vacation Act in Congress, which aims to make employers offer mandatory paid vacations.

Photo by cliff1006 via flickr (creative commons).

Whose responsibility?

Thanks in large part to Congress’ attention, United Airlines has delayed its deadline to cut 28 travel agencies off its credit card merchant account. Sure, the airline felt the pressure from associations to knock it off, but the signed letter from 13 elected politicians no doubt was the final piece of baggage thrown onto this cart.

Rep. Michael Arcuri (D-N.Y.)  told the press in a teleconference earlier this week that he’s not buying United’s argument that this was a cost-saving initiative limited in scope, because the savings would be too small to be worth the effort. When the numbers don’t add up, suspicion swoops in.

And lawmakers were quick to warn United that it really wants to fly right when it comes to the Fair Credit Billing Act.

But that’s not to say the issue is resolved. United has only gone as far as to say these agencies on the chopping block — one allegedly directs $500,000 in ticket sales to UA every year — may ask for a 60-day extension to get their affairs in order. The company continues to swear this is not a pilot program in a more sinister plan to eliminate travel agents from its business plan.

“Finally, this action neither violates nor undermines the Fair Credit Billing Act,” Jeff Foland, United’s senior vice president of worldwide sales and distribution, wrote in a press release. “There will be no difference in how credit card disputes will be handled from a customer’s perspective. Customers who charge their tickets with travel agents will have the same rights they have always had, including the right to dispute charges to their card issuer for non-performed services. This is the case when the impacted travel agents use United’s merchant account; it will continue to be the case when the impacted agents use their own merchant accounts.”

Mass exodus?

The trouble is, the new policy doesn’t break the ARC sales terms, either, as some industry pundits thought early on, officials at the technology solutions company are saying.

So it’s shaping up to become more a battle of wills: can the travel industry kick up enough dust to get United to slink away from this notion or will an airline desperate for cash damn the brownie points and forge ahead with any penny-saving measure it finds? I’m in agreement with Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, who is fond these days of bringing up the backlash Northwest Airlines dealt with when it tried to slap a $7.50 surcharge on any tickets the public buys through an agent. Obviously, that went over like a lead balloon in 2004, and according to Mitchell, it took months to rebuild the business that stunt cost the airline.

Today, NW has been eaten by Delta Airlines. Just sayin’.

Photography: stevendamron, marceatsworld