What will US AIRWAYS do After this Twitter Disaster?

A conversation started between an individual whose flight was delayed for about an hour and US AIRWAYS on Twitter.

She tweeted this @USAirways Unhappy that 1787 sat for an hour on tarmac in CLT because overweight, resulting in over hour late arrival in PDX…

And US Airways tweeted this @ellerafter We truly dislike delays too and are very sorry your flight was affected.

Then she responded @USAirways yeah, you seem so very sorry. So sorry, in fact, that you couldn’t be bothered to address my other tweets.

And that was the beginning of the disaster because US airways tweeted this in response

And if you want to see the NSFW image here is the link link.

To be honest, I wouldn’t want to be in the US AIRWAYS PR team right now because no apology or taking down the picture will fix this.

You have to be very creative and strategic on how to respond to a crisis like this. That is why I always say that every PR team must have a crisis communication plan handy to respond to situations like these without any delay.

They tweeted an apology saying that they are investigating the case. It’s been more than an hour and we are still waiting to hear from them. They are obviously failing their Crisis Communication 101 and to be fair, if I were on their team, I wouldn’t know what to say in reaction to this tweet.