When everything with your airline reservation and flight goes well, it’s like you’ve won the lottery. If something doesn’t go well – they changed your flight time and it doesn’t work with your schedule, you paid for Wi-Fi on your flight and it didn’t work, your flight was canceled and getting your refund isn’t as automatic as expected, etc. – you have to contact the airline.
A while back, we posted about how to contact an actual person for your airline and other complaints. However, not all of those numbers work all the time, and, let’s face it, sometimes it’s simply easier to chat with the company online than to make a phone call.
But there are all these ways to contact them. Twitter (currently known as X). Facebook. Instagram. Ever wonder if one of those modes of contact is better than the others?
Turns out there is!
Emplifi is a leading customer engagement platform that develops cloud-based services for social media marketing, customer service and social commerce. Headquartered in Columbus, OH, the business was founded in 2020 after social media analytics company Socialbakers was acquired by customer experience systems business Astute. The combined entity changed its name to Emplifi. (thanks, Wikipedia!)
Anyway, late last month, Emplifi released social media performance data for multiple airline brands from around the world. They analyzed customers’ sentiments to airlines, and the airlines’ respective response rates across 3 social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and X, between January 1 through May 31, over the course of 5 years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024).
Their findings revealed the sentiment of comments for airline brands:
- Instagram – over half of the comments for these airline brands reflected positive sentiments
- Facebook – 34% of comments about airlines included positive sentiments
- X – only 15% of comments were positive.
Airline brands also earned the highest response rates on Instagram versus response rates on Facebook or X. Since 2022, travelers who took to social media to ask airlines questions were more likely to have their questions answered on:
- Instagram (27% response rate form the airline in question)
- X (24% response rate)
- Facebook (20% response rate)
When looking at a historical view, the sentiment of comments on Instagram has remained overwhelmingly positive for the last four years, and even increased nearly four percentage points in the last year.
So, overall?
Instagram was the best way to contact an airline
“Airline brands take a lot of heat online, but our data shows the sentiment of customer comments on Instagram is overwhelmingly positive – even on Facebook and X, sentiment has remained primarily neutral for the last five years,” said Susan Ganeshan, CMO, Emplifi. “Airline brands need to listen and respond – tracking customers and their service needs on social media networks. By prioritizing customer care on social platforms, it encourages brand loyalty and helps drive profits.”
Our thoughts
I’m gratified to know that airlines are a bit more responsive on Instagram vs. the 2 other social media platforms.
Unfortunately, Emplifi didn’t include their methodology for coming to this conclusion. That they analyzed “sentiment and response rates across Facebook, Instagram, and X between January 1 through May 31 in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024” is a little vague. What constituted positive sentiments s. negative or neutral ones? (and did the negative and neutral sentiments count for anything?) When the airlines responded on social media 27%, 24% and 20% of the time, did they actually DO anything, or did they just say “Bring it to DM?” And once the passenger did bring it to DM, was there a resolution? If so, was it to their liking?
I like that the end result of their study had a definite “winner.” I just wish I knew more of what they actually studied.
What do you think?
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