A few days ago a volcano erupted in Chile. The ash cloud though visually spectacular caused quite a bit of damage in Chile and then travelled all the way to Australia via jet stream. The ash cloud sadly caused Qantas and a number of other airlines to cancel most scheduled flights in and out of Melbourne, Tasmania and New Zealand (where I live). Media reports suggested that 10,000+ people were stranded.

** Warning: Longish post with lots of images (but they are all worth it) **

In the “2.0” world that we live in, how well did the airlines and airports do in informing travellers? Did they make the most effective use of technology? I took a number of screen shots from airline web sites and Twitter around mid-day on 13-June-2010 to record a snap-shot of their response a few hours before the flights resumed.

Summary:

• Melbourne Airport did not mention anything about the volcano or travel disruptions on their main home page.
• Qantas, Virgin Australia and Jetstar provided information on their website — but the links are like Easter eggs that you have to hunt for. A usability disaster in my opinion.
• The airlines seemed to use Twitter to directly communicate with travellers that tweeted out their frustrations online. The weird bit was that all major airlines seem to go to sleep for a solid 12-14 hours every night.

A few recommendations:

• It is quite obvious that most of the airlines do not have alternative landing pages that they can use in case of disasters. It probably is a good idea to have one fully designed and tested disaster time landing page available on stand-by for use by people without HTML/CSS/Javascript skills. Even better — permit updates via SMS or email. Who knows, the CEO may just decide to get involved for few days.
• I know these airlines serve customers world-wide and probably do not want to panic passengers needlessly. So, get your IT folk to look up how to determine location of the browser to make it a bit smart — show the disaster information to areas where it makes sense. While you are at it — get them to automatically set the departure location field as well. If you are in charge and you hear excuses — ask them to open Google maps and show them how it can pick up your location quite reliably. And no .. it is not a multi-million dollar fix unless you really want it to be.
• Assume that disasters will happen on weekends and without any warning. I know airlines are not like news agencies that train for this eventuality — but it may be worth investing a bit of time and effort in that.
• Twitter is great to manage brand image and provide a real-time mass communication. And yes, almost all media follow Twitter feeds of travel providers. All airline have done an admirable job over the last 3 days — but please roster staff 24/7, especially when you have disasters. Frustrated travellers like to hear updates — even if it is the same bit of news hashed up again and again, it is a cheap way to keep your customers a bit happier.

Here is the stream of images that I collected (see Twitter interactions for some interesting information):

Melbourne Airport has the worst site of the lot — not a sliver of information about the fact that thousands of travellers are stuck.

The Kiwis seem to have found a better way to keep their travellers better informed.

So, what exactly did the airlines do? Various attempts were made to IMO hide this information. So intelligence was built into location detection to display a bigger warning. They are currently hiding behind the we sent “SMS” messages statement. But, unless SMS messages are being sent once every 30 minutes with updates, the information would be too stale.

On Twitter things were not too bad, only staff went to sleep for a full 15 hours.

And now to some good news — Airlines were trying to communicate with passengers directly on Twitter.  Not all is lost I guess. I suspect over time management will start to redirect resources towards these communication channels and also try and get additional information flowing as best as they can.