Does Flyertalk make any difference?
 

I'm sure we'd all agree Flyertalk is a valuable resource for travelers. And often I've read on these forums, "Someone should show all these posts to [an airline/hotel managers/etc.]"

But has this ever happened?

Does anyone know of any instances where an airline, hotel, other travel service business, or government agency has made any changes because of Flyertalk discussions?

People vote with their feet. If someone posts about a bad experience on this site that company might lose money and see the error in its ways. Or they will get out of business if they fail to learn.

Nope. It's never happened.

Maybe not directly as the OP states but perhaps indirectly? I think many of the airlines and hotel partners have employees monitoring FT (and other social networking sites I imagine). So maybe there has been more influence than meets the eye?

Oh, absolutely. Some have official representation (Starwood Lurker, missydarlin [semi-officially, anyway]), and others have more anonymous management-level people participating. Other management-level people for other companies lurk silently. (Others...ahem, United...do, admittedly, tend to discount us as a bunch of whiners... ;))

Many probably don't have the time to read every single thread, but if it's a hot topic, you can bet there's a good chance it's being noticed. Perhaps not acted upon (at least immediately), but definitely noticed.

Given that this is a board made up largely of frequent flyers, I wonder, as a whole, how much the 10,000 or so active participants represent to the airline industry in terms of a percentage of revenue. It probably is relatively insignificant, but it's certainly a larger percentage than any other group of 10,000 people selected at random. And of course, many people here have great influence over the revenue spent by others (I'm sure there are a few people here who run travel departments of large companies...)

Several airlines have had focus groups of FTers. I can't point to any specific changes they made because of those, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any. There have also been chat sessions with airline executives in which FTers offered suggestions. If something is basically revenue-neutral (none of the too-common "we're entitled, we want more, gimme-gimme-gimme"), why wouldn't they do it?

It's happened.

The Flyertalk UA community probably was responsible for UA agreeing to restore 500 mile minimums for elites and offer the conversion of expired e500s to RDMs.

At the Delta DO last week, we were told that DL has a firm round up the ten most discussed subjects on the DL forum on FT and send those out to several people at HQ for review.

FlyerTalk opinion contributed heavily to a policy change just a few days ago as to Starwood hotels, as to soap bars in properties. See post 174 of this thread. Also individual hotel managers have sometimes responded to guest concerns posted on FlyerTalk threads.

Another UA Change
 

It seems as though Flyertalk was fairly instrumental in United making an exception for ticketing dates for their DEQM promotion. Flyertalk also helped to publicize the exception as I did not hear about it from any other UA source directly.

SWA Brian on the southwest board regularly interacts, solicits input, and talks about what is going on inside the company.

i'm surprised no one has mentioned the "dark side" of airlines et al. monitoring FT: catching mistake fares and super deals.

Many forums have official lurkers. Given monitoring FT is part of their jobs I'd be very suprised if there haven't been changes as a result.

10 most discussed? Got to be that lounge thread! :D

You are right. Credit must be given to a FTer for mkaing the exception a reality.

Any company that does not monitor and make changes based on sites such as FT surely employs only idiots.

I can give you examples from other boards where topics have become so hot the president of the company has jumped into to calm everyone down.