Where did United go wrong?

In the spring of 2008, Dave Carroll and his band “Sons of Maxwell” were flying on United Airlines from through the Chicago O’Hare airport on their way to Nebraska, when a woman behind him looked out the window and observed that the baggage handlers were throwing a guitar case around the tarmac. Carroll and his band looked on in horror, as they knew the guitars being thrown around were bound to be theirs.

When Carroll arrived in Nebraska, his fears were confirmed, and his $3,500 dollar Taylor guitar was broken. He immediately tried to talk to three United employees to try to file a claim, but none of them were any help, as they just passed the buck. When Carroll arrived home he filed a claim with Air Canada (an affiliate of United Airlines), and they accepted the claim, but told him that he had to take it up with United, because they were the ones who handled his bags.

After nearly a year of fighting with United over settling a payment for his guitar, they finally denied Carroll a $1,200 waiver to cover the cost of the repairs to his guitar. Carroll stated that he was past being angry, but he was going to write three songs about the experience, and put them on YouTube. United still denied payment to him, so Carroll went through with his promise, and posted a video on YouTube.

The video Carroll put out was viewed over 150,000 times in the first week of being on the internet. Within a few months, the video had jumped up to over 4,000,000 views. The damage this cost United is undeniable, but there have also been critics who directly correlate the 150,000 views in the first week, with a $180 million dollar drop in the stocks of United. Some critics claim that the video single handedly lost the airline the $180 million; however there are many other critics who point out that this was during a large crash for all airline companies, and United was taking a fall just like every other airline.

But did Carroll have a massive effect on the reputation of United airlines? I believe that he did. 4,000,000 views on the first video, and another 800,000 on the second video is no laughing matter. I believe that this damaged United’s reputation, even if it was only for a short time. Carroll’s video’s were appropriate in my mind, as he waited patiently with United for almost a year to get a settlement, and then warned them that he was going to put these videos up. I don’t believe that he was trying to be slanderous to United’s name either, and that he was simply telling his story.

United Airlines did a horrible job with public relations. While the employees were doing their job, and just following the companies rules for handling claims, they did a bad job from the time that Carroll approached the three employees right after his flight, to when they denied him the flight waiver for the final time. No matter how you look at it, United could have done a much better with maintaining good relations between them and their customers. Particularly Dave Carroll. If they really did lose $180 million over the music video, this would mean that they could have paid for over 52,000 replacement guitars.

The company did back peddle and offer to pay him after about a week of the video being out; however Carroll declined, stating that they had their chance and are now more than welcome to donate the money to a charity of their choice, under his name. United then donated $3,000 to the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz for music education for kids; however the damage to their name had already been done, and this damage control went almost unnoticed.

The “United Breaks Guitars” song by Dave Carroll was extremely popular, and extremely detrimental on United’s reputation. These types of public relations blunders are easily avoidable by companies, and if United has just given Carroll the $1,200 in flight waivers that Carroll asked for, it could have saved United’s name from more defamation, and a lot of money.


Adam