Great experience with an Airline and I didn’t Even fly
I have been receiving Virgin Blue’s newsletter for some time now, and use them almost every time I need to fly to Melbourne to visit family. Recently the frequency of their newsletter was on the rise, and coinciding with their push relating to QANTAS’s change to their frequent flyer points system. It was at this point that I felt that I wanted to unsubscribe from their newsletter, simply because I didn’t need the updates, not that I wanted to discontinue my relationship with them in any way.
My first thinking was to simply scroll to the bottom of the most recent email and click the unsubscribe link. Much to my surprise, there was no such link to be found. Although they had taken the time to include about 4 paragraphs of terms and conditions relating to the offers within the newsletter, they had not included one of the most standard (not to mention required by law) features of a newsletter.
Instead there was simply an ‘Update Details’ link at the bottom of the email. This link took me to the Virgin Blue site and requested me to login with my Velocity number and password- neither of which I dad on hand nor should need to unsubscribe.
Feeling a little annoyed, I placed a post on twitter about the oversight, and gave it an @ reply to Sir Richard Branson. You can see the post below:
Next is where things TOTALLY turned around and forced me to not only praise Virgin Blue but prompted me to write this post.
The following day, just shy of 24 hours after my original post (23 hours an 47 minutes) I received the following tweet from Virgin Blue:
It is great to see brands monitoring what is said about them online through different social media, and very pleasing that they are taking the time to reply to individual post such as the one I sent. This is in stark contrast to the way that Jetstar seem to be using Twitter, as illustrated in Tiphereth Gloria’s Digital Tip blog post today Jetstar’s 5 cent Fail Sail.
