JetBlue has been flying in some unfamiliar PR territory lately coming off of a series of flight delays and cancellations that angered customers and left employees flat-out stupefied.

The airline has been notorious for its low fares, great service, in-seat entertainment system, and spiffy blue branding. But last week’s nor’ easter strained the airline’s communications and crisis center to the point where it simply couldn’t keep up.

Today’s New York Times cited JetBlue’s CEO as being “humiliated and mortified” – a strong statement of honesty in the wake of the breakdown.

While it’s a bold PR move to have the CEO drop his pants in concession like that, the communications “I’m sorry” shouldn’t end there. Head on over to JetBlue’s site, click on travel alert at the top and you get a bit of a different sense of where the blame lies:

JetBlue continues to experience cancellations and delays as a result of Wednesday’s ice storm in the Northeast. Please check the status of your flight online before proceeding to the airport.

…

Please be advised that we are currently experiencing extremely high call volumes and may be difficult to get through to a Reservation Agent. If you can, we recommend you wait to until a later date to call and rebook.

Weather alert? But the CEO just said:

“I had flight attendants sitting in hotel rooms for three days who couldn’t get a hold of us. I had pilots e-mailing me saying, ‘I’m available, what do I do?’”

H E L L O!?! Is the left hand talking to the right hand? If so, they’re speaking different languages.

From the outside looking in it seems like there are some smart people working the media side, but who’s thinking about the most important public: the customers? Don’t continue to point at the storm as the reason why peoples’ flights are still canceled. No other airlines are that we’re aware of. It’s mostly your own fault. The CEO just said so in one of the world’s most respected newspapers. So fess up, tell your customers the truth, and find a good way to show them you really care that you messed-up their lives this week. Whoever wrote this notice for the site better get on the same page of what’s going on here…quickly. And, it’s going to take more than a free flight to make the customers who got burned feel comfortable flying with the airline again.

Press releases. The team has been busy cranking out copy to fill them in around lists of canceled flights, but no one is willing to put his/her name on the release as a media contact. All that’s listed is “JetBlue Corporate Communications.”

Then there’s CEO Neeleman’s flight log – a blog that would have been a great venue for him to connect with his brand believers. Head on over there and all you see is a post from Feb. 1 proclaiming how much money they made in ‘06. Seems a bit trite given the circumstances, no?

Get this: the hottest job on JetBlue’s career’s section right now is “Customer Service Provisioning Crew.” What’s a provisioning crew? Seth Godin had a great post a little while ago about saying sorry. It might be time to JetBlue to circulate this around the old provision team.

As unfortunate as it is, this is a great wake-up call for JetBlue. All of these little bits of communications evidence add up and point to things not really flying on autopilot. Good companies have smart people in the right roles to help them through little hiccups (we mean crises) like this. We hope JetBlue has some of these in it.

This little shakedown is a reminder for the rest of us to dust off the crisis communications plan or take that off-site you’ve been postponing to dream up all these nasty scenarios of what could go wrong – and then figure out exactly what you’d do when it happens. Why? Because it will.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 6:49 pm and is filed under PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.