Hundereds of thousands if not millions of dollars they will never get.

I rest my case on customer service.

I’ll bet the PR department does not tell Rob Fyfe what to say. Unless Rob Fyfe wants to undo all the good work he has done over the last two years he should be on the phone to his customer with a grovelling apology. Then he should visit his PR department and start handing out DCM notices.

Yeah, hadn’t thought about the Auckland-Wellington return leg. No doubt they’d have suggested he continue on to Wellington then get a return fare on the next flight back to Auckland.

I don’t think the interviewer needed to press it any further. We could all see that Air New Zealand’s response was as preposterous as their original set of options.

It wasn’t intended as a defence. I can tell you, however, that from our experience, large corporations often have quite inflexible rules about what even quite high level employees may and may not say. The Communications and PR departments are often surprisingly powerful. Ms Langridge may not have been able to make a concession let alone offer an apology.

I would normally assume anyone rising to GM level had a mind of her own and could tell the PR people where to get off. Either that or she could just have thought on her feet.

I thought the Fair Go inteviewer let her off very lightly. I think the $50 fee was outrageous considering he had already paid the fare from Wn to Akl. What aboutsecurity/airport surcharges; these should have been refunded.

And suppose the passenger had adopted ANZ’s lunatic idea of getting a flight down to Wn to come back again; what would have happened when he had failed to show for the Wn leg on his return from Beijing? Presumably ANZ would have gone into meltdown.

ANZ was vey quick to get stuck into IBM following the recent computer failure. It wants to do some soul searching and the first thing is that Rob Fyffe should tell call centre operators and Leanne Langridge get an injection of the common sense gene.

You may well have a point. She was probably given a Q & A briefing by the PR department along with a list of “key messages”. One of our biggest challenges on training sessions is to undo the harm done by external or internal PR and Communications people who promote these “key messages” as essential preparation for any interview. So the interviewee approaches the interview like an actor with set lines which he/she has to speak. All very well if the other actor in the scene – the interviewer – delivers the cues that will allow the interviewee to speak his/her lines. That almost never happens. This is really appalling advice and is virtually universal in the PR/Communications industry. “Messages” have no place in an interview. They’re transparent and the average listener/viewer can spot them in an instant. A good interview should be a dialogue between interviewer and interviewee. Prospective interviewee should marshall their arguments not rehearse their answers. That way you’re not going to get caught out. It’s sensible to have considered which important points you want/need to make. But that is a very different matter from preparing a set of messages.