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.

Here's the direct link to post #174. :)

Tell me about FT Power! ;)

I am surprised that OP wasn't aware of how many such air/hotel/credit cards/freebie "hot" deals were cancelled/stopped due to FT influence.

Very much so.

I've personally been able to identify online passenger complaints and issues with my airline via FlyerTalk and then contact the passenger offline to resolve. These have ranged from Denied Boarding compensation issues to sorting out visa issues to simply making contact with important corporate customers directly when we usually deal just with their agents.

It's not a policy change, but BA updated their staff lounge access cards based on direct FT feedback. ^

Absolutely! Just check out CO Insider's posts in the Continental forum.

For even the modestly traveling, examples of the above abound, but for me, the "real" benefit has been the ability to gain a sense of "empowerment" based upon the experiences and battles (wins & losses) of other FTites.

I take personal credit for Continental having to create a new award category and double the mileage required after I was actually able to book and fly a BKK-NRT-GUM-CNS-GUM-NRT-BKK award on 25K OnePass miles some years ago. Such Asia-Australia bookings from NW-only cities involving NW as well as CO metal were basically impossible and I slipped mine through (after multiple other rejected attempts) only because of SARS cancellations. Three months later they had the new category and a 50K requirement if the itin had NW metal. Others have tried to dispute my claim of credit, but I stand by it. And I'm glad it probably cost them many times the amount to create, police and administer such a narrowly focused award as they "lost" by the booking getting through.

"One airline can make a difference"? Pfah! Flyertalk can.

As others have posted, CO listens to FTers. We generally won’t hear about how issues are addresses but when they can publicly comment on something that’s changing because of FT, they are more than happy to mention it here. Now listen is one thing and caving into everyone’s varied preferences and desires is something else.

To give a slight idea how much they value FT feedback, the audience In This Photo are FT members. If you look at the larger version of the photo you will see on the opposite wall the CEO Larry Kellner and the President Jeff Smisek. Along the back wall on the right are many other CO employees, all giving up their personal time on a Saturday, w/o pay, to host FT members.

Lots of useful information in this community, a large reader base, and a lot of meaningful discussions. An excellent place for travel companies to check consumer response to company policies and decisions.

Yes, it makes a difference.

I must concur that FT has made for several changes at CO both big and small. In general it is just nice to have a company that listens to their customers and wants to try and make the customer experience all that much better.

And we have a direct line into the website/IT end of things, with a very pro-active, very helpful lurker. Now, if we report a bug on the website, it gets investigated and usually gets sorted ^^^

Although even before we got an official lurker to help us with this (and they're a gem), BA used us for this anyway.

I recall when they launched a new online route map, as quickly as we were reporting errors on it on the FT thread, the errors were magically being corrected on the route map. Flying geekdom meets IT geekdome for a good end result :D