Frankly, I find it hard to believe that gate staff of a delayed flight are monitoring Twitter and comparing it to their passenger manifests in realtime. A more likely scenario in my mind is that the dude was hostile and abusive towards the staff, they perhaps told him that he couldn't say something like that and be expected to board, and he chose to interpret that as with respect to his tweet.
I don't know, I wasn't there. However, before sentencing EasyJet, it would be nice to have a corroboration of the facts.
The string of tweets in the link imply that he was pulled out of line as a direct consequence of the initial tweet about the active duty soldier being inconvenienced.
Also, because the columnist holds a law degree and is working on his PhD in law, the implication is that he would (should!) be more careful about what he says in writing and may understand the consequences (or lack thereof) of his actions at a better 'instinctual' level than others.
Based on these two weak lines of reasoning, I'm more inclined to lean towards events playing out as he outlined. I agree that it would be better for EasyJet to corroborate the sequence of events.
>Frankly, I find it hard to believe that gate staff of a delayed flight are monitoring Twitter and comparing it to their passenger manifests in realtime.
If we believe the columnist's story, this is the weird thing. How did EasyJet respond so quickly to the tweet?
That's quite a feat of coordination, since usually social media PR agencies are contracted to monitor consumer sentiment and feed summarized reports back to the brand marketing or in-house PR teams.
In this instance, there would have had to have been the following sequence of events for this to have happened:
* Something (person or process) monitoring the EasyJet brand on all social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, media property comment sections, etc.)
* Sending/alerting the appropriate backoffice and frontline teams
* Cross-referencing the identity of the tweeter with EasyJet logistics (i.e. which plane was delayed, tweeter profile picture)
That chain is impressive. Presumably, a frontline employee (i.e. gate personnel) took over at this point.
If we believe the rest of this story and tweets, the frontline employee looked at the twitter profile, presumed that he was a lawyer, told their manager, and tried to deny the columnist the ability to board citing that because he was a lawyer he should "know better".
Suppose you are an expert in creating a buzz. One day you want to create a buzz around you. You tweet a bit, discuss it with some people until they say that they're not happy with your tweet. You actually get on the plane fine. But still you fabricate most of the story to get the buzz you were looking for. Far fetched?
EasyJet is akin to Tesco Value - its shit but you generally know what you are getting. Ryanair on the other hand is like dumpster diving - you COULD get a cheap meal but if you aren't careful you'll get food poisoning.
Frankly, I find it hard to believe that gate staff of a delayed flight are monitoring Twitter and comparing it to their passenger manifests in realtime. A more likely scenario in my mind is that the dude was hostile and abusive towards the staff, they perhaps told him that he couldn't say something like that and be expected to board, and he chose to interpret that as with respect to his tweet.
I don't know, I wasn't there. However, before sentencing EasyJet, it would be nice to have a corroboration of the facts.