While Larry's responsiveness is to be commended, it's important to keep in mind that this is essentially part of CO's Customer Service arm. In the context that WE CARE routinely fails CO's customers, people are driven to write to the CEO or another exec.
How often does one actually feel the need or desire to write a company executive? A healthy organization has a working CS organization that is empowered to fix problems, and also collects, aggregates and reports data. There are plenty of examples of airlines and other industries doing just that without customers having to write the CEO.
While his responsiveness is to be applauded, it's also a testament to how poorly his CS organization is doing. If customers do not believe they can write in and have their concerns taken seriously, he should have worked to resolve that issue.
How is an event like that representative of the employees? Obviously the customer-friendly ones are the ones who would want to work those events. Some bitter FA, or some shenanigans-pulling GA is not about to sign up for something like that. We never met anyone from WE-CARE at the DO's did we?
I'm not sure I understand what the difference is. These days CO's main differentiator is a free sandwich, at least in Y.
Likely not a popular view on this board, but it's quite possible. From a FF perspective, many of the negative changes that were put into place during Larry's tenure have been reversed with this change. Plus you look at CO's current position w.r.t. the joint venture, vs. CO's previous protectionist attitude towards codeshares and multi-carrier itineraries, and a lot of these changes began to come to fruition just as Larry's departure was announced. It may be coincidence, it may not be. We'll likely never know.
While I agree with this rationale, but it would make more sense if CO didn't promote from within for the CEO positions. If they were looking for a CEO to do XYZ, theoretically they would recruit from the outside to find the right person, not take an existing executive and see if they'd make it as CEO.