We’ve all had bad customer service experiences, and in most cases when you bring it to the company’s attention that caused the bad experience, they do their best to try and retain you as a customer and provide some form of resolution. Well David Carroll, attempted in good faith to get resolution from United Airlines when his Taylor guitar was damaged by careless baggage handlers at Chicago’s O’Hare who were seen by passengers on the plane tossing the checked guitar case around. After months of conversations back and forth with various people at the airline and the airlines flat out refusal to correct the error on their part, David Carroll has decided to take matters into his own hands and creatively deal with the situation.

David ended his final conversation with United Airlines with a pledge to write and produce three songs and make videos for each song and release them out to the public so that the world would learn about what United had done. The first song and video entitled “United Breaks Guitars” is available for viewing on YouTube and I’ve embedded it here for your viewing pleasure. The second song has been written but the video has not yet been made and the third song will be coming according to the report on David Carroll’s website describing the story of his bad experience with United. To read about David’s dealings with United, click here to visit David Carroll’s blog.

Whether or not United tries to make good on their poor customer service remains to be seen. But one thing is for certain, they’re clearly going to be getting more attention and not in a good way as evidenced by the video below which is from CNN covering the story. Wolf Blitzer refers to the incident as a Public Relations Nightmare for United Airlines.

In fact, I learned about the mishap through a travel newsletter called “The Travel Insider” run by David Rowell. And I’m sharing it here on my blog. The more the story spreads the more damaging it looks for United. At what point does the bad press and coverage become more costly to United than it would have been to just replace the guitar their baggage handlers had broken?

The irony for me is that I am a member of United’s Mileage Plus program and all of my frequent flyer miles are with United. I’ve had mostly great experiences on the airline, and I think they made a big mistake not taking ownership of the problem and replacing David Carroll’s guitar. Again, click here to read David Carroll’s account of his experiences trying to get the situation resolved.

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