Is your next flight going to be on a #planeoffame or a #planeofshame?

I had been following Addison Schonland's Innovation Analysis Group (IAG) blog for quite a while (by the way, if you are interested in how this industry works you should too!) and then I saw they were onto a new initiative that, as someone interested in both airlines and social networks, really caught my eye...here is the post I am refering to:

So I got in touch with Addison Schonland and Robert Vinet to find out more about this project...

Addison has got a long experience in the airline industry,  he has beeninvolved with airline surveys since the late 1980’s and he knows well that these surveys are missing a large number of things, both good and bad, so he started to look for a way of empowering travelers to provide insight, with evidence, about their flight experience. 

Fortunately, camera phones and social networks have opened up lots of interesting possibilities on this front...

For example, on a recent trip Addison noticed that  the seats were terribly dirty and a magazine that was out of date, using social media to deliver immediate feedback seemed like the obvious way to go.

In Addison's words: "The consolidation among airlines means less choice and (in my view) less service. I have seen standards among US carriers fall off considerably over the past ten years. Airlines like to say people are paying less for travel. That may be true, but dirty or broken airplanes and nasty staff are not excusable at any price."

So why not look for ways to structure this and facilitate the sharing of airline feedback , both good and bad?

In order to bring this project to fruition, Addison got in tocuh with Robert, of socialmediadatalab.com, as they had already collaborated in setting up eezeer, a vertical socialnetwork of travelers that allows travelers to share information between them about destinations and airlines.

On top of the sharing of information, eezeer fetched, categorized and scored the tweets and discussions between airline accounts and travelers. For its airline clients, a monthly infographic was produced ranking airline usage and performance for the previous month. The system is nowadays being redesigned and has temporarily been put offline. You can still access some of the infographics that were produced here.

So, promoting tags to gather travelers opinion (positive and negative) just seemed like a logical extension of eezerr's social media measuring tools, the technical capabilities available could handle all the data capture and processing.

Furthermore, once the technology is there, why stop at airlines? Their goal is to allow travelers to share their experiences as they fly around. So they plan to add soon hotels and trains and other travel-related services.

How does it work?

So, let's say I am a traveler and I wish to provide feedback..what do I have to do?

All you have to do is Tweet, Pinterest or  Instagram an image with the hastags #planeoffame (if the experience delighted you) or #planeofshame (if the experience was bad). The eeZeer system takes it from there...

So, next time you travel, either if you have a fantastic flight or you have a bad experience, you know where you can go to report it!

By the way, for further reference here are some images of the airline roll of shame...