Yes, it's great to be able to attract a lot of consumer attention by telling a good story -- the "United Breaks Guitars" guy certainly proved that! There is an even better option that I would be fascinated to hear whether this blogger used: the Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement Airline Service Complaint form, or the "DoT complaint", http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/problems.htm.
Domestic airlines treat statistics about these complaints as a core KPI. As a result, filing a DoT complaint has a few distinct advantages over just writing a blog post and hoping it catches on: (1) it guarantees you a response from a senior executive, (2) you can present the facts exactly the way you want (something this blog post complains was impossible when asking a customer service rep to file an internal complaint), (3) aggregate statistics about DoT complaints become public record and can help other people make informed decisions about where to spend their travel money.
In my experience, when you file one of these forms, you get a response within a week from a senior executive in Houston who has read your entire complaint, has investigated the problem, and is empowered to fix it.
It's good for other consumers to file one of these complaints, in addition to writing a blog post, because the aggregate information the DoT publishes can help consumers make better decisions. We actually have data to show that this person's horrible experience was not an isolated incident of a few misbehaving staff who did not represent the company; instead, the data suggest a pattern of increasingly scary service delivery failures. In the first half of 2012, United's DoT complaint numbers doubled year-over-year, according to the DoT's latest Air Travel Consumer Report. (See discussion at e.g. http://consumerist.com/2012/08/united-airlines-now-responsib...).
To loop things back around: the "United lost a ten-year-old" headline would be totally unnecessary in a DoT complaint, because it would rapidly reach an expert who understood the real problem and knew how to fix it.
There is an even better option that I would be fascinated to hear whether this blogger used: the Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement Airline Service Complaint form, or the "DoT complaint",
I had no idea there was such a thing. I'll file that data away, just in case.
You are logically correct. From the parent's point of view the initial impression was 'lost'.
They put the kid on the plane in one airport, she failed to show up at the destination. This was all the parents knew for several hours.
This kind of first impression is going to stick with a person, and it's going to be retold that way.