I am periodically reading forums for the airlines I am using in my travel and find them very useful. I have come to discover several categories of members:
- Some are occasional travelers on this airline and asking genuine questions.
- Some are frequent posters systematically ranting and venting their emotional anger.
- Some are fakes, i.e. they hardly ever fly except in dreams thru the forum. One must be a bit careful with their posts as they primarily repeat what they read somewhere, without any personal experience or checking, and with a little twist of personal invention.
- Some true frequent flyers are frequently on FT because they got the FT bug and prefer that to a TV series.
- But there is another category of posters which I will call "airline monitors" (AM). On some forums (e.g. U.S. airlines or BD) they are airline representatives providing answers to difficult technical questions on the FFP. They do not hide behind a false nose and their contribution is very useful. But on some airline forums, one cannot escape the conclusion that some airline representative or service contribute by posing as a regular traveler. It cannot be avoided and it is normal that airlines monitor this and other forums. But it is annoying when the AM claims to crisscross the world (especially in F) and systematically posts very-positive experiences about every single aspect of the airline. How can such a successful, and hence extremely-busy, businessman find the time for these numerous biased posts? In some forums, it is easy to tell that the AM uses different names to post as some posts are almost copy & paste. I guess that this is good marketing by the airline, but it is misleading the occasional traveler posting on FT….