Gone in a Puff of Smoke

More than 60, 000 passengers were left grounded yesterday when majour airlines were forced to delay their flights after the Puyehue volcano erupted in Chile causing the skies to fill with smoke. Not a happy day to be one of those major airlines. Many of those passengers had jobs, wives and kids to fly back to and likely some on urgent matters. So how would major airlines such as Qantas deal with a situation such as this.

Unfortunately there is nothing that Qantas can do to control volcanic eruptions yet they still receive backlash from events such as this. It would be important for everyone at the airline to remain calm and refer to whatever crisis procedure that they have in place. The safest thing for them to do would be to have the CEO release a statement to the press. They happen to have a slight advantage as the press would be well aware of the volcano situation. Where possible everyone who was to be flying out on that day should be informed immediately if there is a chance that there will be a delay on their flight or if it will be cancelled. As long as customers are informed they are less likely to react strongly when they are told that they will in fact not get a flight for 8 more hours.

While all of the customers are being informed the staff should also be informed fully on the situation, including those that may be expecting flight arrivals from the affected airports. As long as the staff are well informed and have been trained on how to handle situations such as this they should be able to keep the customers calm until there is a definitive response on what will be happening.

Once the airline is sure that about the flight delays and they inform the customers, the customers will be expecting some sort of compensation for their time lost and inconvenience. Often it would be acceptable for the airline to organise tickets for the next available flight and offer complimentary accommodation for the night where necessary.

Once the airline has clearance to function normally again they would need to immediately have the customers informed with a flight ticket ready for them.

They would then want to release a statement to the press confirming that the situation is now back to normal.

Hopefully they functioned well in the crisis which would mean there would be little need for reflection as they can't very well stop a volcano from erupting.