By: Anindya Widita, B.A, M.A

Handling and managing crisis in the company is just one of many functions of Public Relations (PR). The crisis can arise within the company or outside, meaning the public is involved. It is a common sense that no company is built with the intention of causing a crisis or controversy. However, at times, one cannot simply avoid a crisis from happening.

When a crisis happens, every organization must take a very careful approach in their effort of handling it, because their image and reputation is on the line and the stake is high for them. This is where PR plays an important function in every organization. Having said that, it is not rare that bad PR move or decision still happened. A lot of the times they were not able to give the best solution in solving the crisis or controversy, thus making the problem worse for the company. The cause of such problem may vary.

The most recent and viral case of crisis management was of United Airlines’ fiasco with one of its passenger who got dragged and physically assaulted in their attempt to force him off the plane due to the flight being ‘overbooked’. The case blew up so quickly because the incident got caught on video and posted online. From that moment, the company was put under scrutiny of the public, who expressed their disappointment and anger towards the airline’s improper treatment towards their customer.

The airline clearly made a huge mistake here for their way of managing the overbooked flight, and the fact that they let it happened in the first place. If you think about it, there was no going back from that and fixing it is a tough task. However, instead of making effort to handle it and lessen the negative impact, they made an even bigger, more crucial mistake: they did not make proper apology and fail to address the issue properly (Petroff, 2017). Furthermore, the CEO also failed to acknowledge that they made a mistake. Therefore, the public was so quick to turn their back on the company. The overall lack of sensitivity towards the real issue just made it worse. As a result, the case above was labeled a PR disaster by experts.

The airline industry is the industry that is probably an industry that has bigger risk in relation to crisis with the level of customer engagement happening every second, both on the ground and off the ground. The company always needs to be prepared in case something as small as flight delay happens because customers are bound to react fast. When something as big as the crisis with the United Airlines happened, one has to wonder what went wrong, is it the PR? Is it the bad employee management? Nonetheless, that case ought to be a reminder for the industry to ensure they do not make the same mistake.

Source:

Petroff, A., 2017, United Airlines shows how to make a PR crisis a total disaster, CNN Money, 11 April,

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/11/news/united-passenger-pr-disaster/index.html