Study Case: United Breaks Guitars

Summary

Study case presents the situation from 2008, when Dave Carroll - professional musician suffered an incident of damaging his guitar at Chicago O’Hare airport during transfer his instrument from one plane to another.

Carroll decided to make a claim against United Airlines for a total amount of $1,200 worth of United Airlines flight vouchers, which was an amount he paid to repair his professional Taylor guitar.

He spend more than 9 months fighting with the United Airlines customer service system, which is perfectly designed in order to frustrate affected customers into giving up their claims. United Airlines are very good at it as they have call center situated in India and it’s really though to get in contact with a proper person instead of calling different departments multiple times. Making a claim, fulfilling all the restrictions and following the rules of United Airlines all together conduct to never-ending story full of writings and unuseful phone calls.

Claim was denied.

Carroll decided that he won’t give up and will fight till the end; he came up with an idea of publishing trilogy of videos on Youtube called “United Breaks Guitars” where he sings his own invented songs according to his poor experiences with United Airlines.

The video was published on 9th of July 2009 and here came take off…

Being shared by different social media channels it has reached a huge audience in a short period of time.

Dave Carroll

• Interviews in top TV/radio channels in 3 days after publishing

• 4,6 million of views by the end of July (1,7 million in 4 days!!!) <Now nearly 18 million views>

• Carroll gets the support from Taylor Guitars (replace and repair of damaged guitar)

• Huge increase in selling CDs and downloading his songs on iTunes

• Dave Carroll become a public speaker

Thunderstorm on Twitter

United Airlines

• United Airlines stock price fall of 10% ($180 millions)

• Huge reputation downfall, it took United Airlines more than one year to recover

All the facts above conducted to the drastic change of United Airlines narration. They apologized and offered Carroll a total of $2400 (half in cash half in vouchers), he refused it. Asked UA to donate $3000 to music school for children - Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.

United Airlines have lost way, way more