Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Media blows it up into this insane thing, that Lufthansa is evil, and doesn't want you to track your bags, so they can lose it with no repercussions.
Lufthansa clarifies things (once again, in line with law) - and then the media uses works like "face plant", "baffling" and "awkward". Assigning emotional context that ridicules Lufthansa.
This plays out all the time with the media and is a huge part of the reason why confidence in the media is at a all time low.
Most customer rankings disagree with you. Which doesn't mean the airline should be free from criticism, of course.
> Most customer rankings disagree with you
They're higher than expected but not in the top 10 of any rankings I've seen... And dropping...
Another example. I could excuse a lot but after what the employee told us, the visible lack of organization when we flew with them plus quite a few more anecdotes I'm definitely avoiding them. Seems there's something fundamentally wrong with their infrastructure. Hell, the airtag thing blew up for a reason.
There’s something wrong at Lufthansa. The queue to fill out my lost luggage form was like an hour long when I arrived, and looked to be just as long when I was done.
I've had decent experiences with "crappy" poor country airlines--oftentimes they compensate with decent food and seats often feel relatively spacious. Probably more likely to crash and die, though.
I will not consider LH metal for any reason.
I took a Lufthansa+Air Canada trip because it was $300ish cheaper than the alternatives and I regret it. I also know many people personally who have had terrible experiences this past summer.
My suggestion would be to rebook if possible, but it might not be too bad since the summer is over. Either way I hope things go smoothly.
Well there you go...
It's bad in the sense that they constantly reschedule or cancel flights, are constantly late and there's absolutely no recourse to getting compensation.
But once you're on the plane it's mostly fine.
And it's usually based on a single one-off bad experience.
Basically in Germany, they tend to operate with considerably more autonomy. It is not uncommon to see official Twitter accounts arguing with customers, where in the US you'd probably just get a canned response or ignored if you're sufficiently rude. So I'm not surprised that someone like this decided to interpret policy by themselves, and failed.
That's one way to put it.
Another way to put it is:
> They tend to operate without much oversight or ethical boundaries.
> They seem more approachable with possibly more positive interactions.
Lufthansa's employees regularly act poorly and maliciously, when pointed out that they are in the wrong (weither local, foreign, or own company regulations or even being there when they're scheduled to) they don't care and they know they'll get away with it. They can and will leave you at the airport without a refund. It's been this way for at least a decade.
This has happened to me many times, and it has many documented cases on HN, Reddit, Twitter, settled EU261 suits, and FlyerTalk.
>Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter
You mean the person who posts to the verified Lufthansa twitter account?
https://twitter.com/lufthansa/status/1578879849577385984
This doesn't seem like some low level rep that got called up to get manipulated.
I think the lesson here is that if your verified twitter account says something ... people take it seriously.
But companies want people to pay attention to their twitter accounts and take them seriously right?
Can't suddenly decide they don't want them to ...
Sales wanted the tech support folks (me included) to answer questions ... but the nature of the setup always included a TON of needed background information. So we just trained the sales drones to teach them how to efficiently shepherd the customers through the process of opening a ticket / open one for them and etc.
It kept the twitter stream to mostly sales type stuff, that worked.
Until there is new information presented, I will continue to assert that they have not changed. (That first part of the sentence is copied from verbatim from a CSR email when explaining an exceptionally bad experience with them)
You're quick to spread around accusations of incompetence and dishonesty.
Is it too hard to think that a corporation's main PR communication channel actually reflects the company's official PR policy, and that their backpedalling is really the company changing it's public message to reflect a change of heart in a company policy?
This kind of nonsense activism hurts us all.
A friend of mine operates social media (at a tactical level) for a very large company and it sounds like they have a good set of operating guidelines in place to prevent problems like Lufthansa has here.
Now, most of his job is just replying to the same questions all day long (and he has a small team of people to handle the volume). All of the information they give out has been pre-approved, but once in awhile something new comes along and he runs it up the flag pole to marketing and/or legal before adding it to his list of approved replies.
Additionally, he works with the communications department, sales, and marketing to create planned communications. His expertise is in social media, and he guides the communications from the other departments on what will work well on social media. But he rarely comes up with the actual message.
Of course one of the reasons everything has to be an approved response and you cant get "plain answers" from companies or politicians for that matter is shitty journalists looking for something they can take out of context and blow out of proportion.
Journalism is it's own worst enemy sometimes.
But they said nothing. For about 6 days. And on their twitter accout I do not see: hi so sorry we made mistake. AirTags are allowed.
In other words: this was not the actions of some random low level person at Lufthansa, this was the actions of Lufthansa because it was an authorized person speaking on authorized channels. If they spoke incorrectly, that is within their power to fix and prevent from happening again.
jk
Yes - modern technology is making an objectively malformed economy and social signalling system.
Still crossing fingers that there is a viable solution to populism.
It is exhausting and I refuse to click through such titles - but nowadays that’s almost all of them.
I can't believe that someone pressured a lower level customer service. From my experience, they (the employees) decided to make up a new rule that benefited them.
Lufthansa official twitter account clearly said: “Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony”
So are you saying that official Lufthansa twitter account is some low level employee? So I should not trust messages posted on their twitter account?
I fly Lufthansa a lot and I follow their twitter account thinking that is official account to update me rafting different rules (COVID, etc.)
If they made a mistake that is ok: they should imeditatelly tweet again and said that. There will be no “crazy media”. But nope - nobody even customer service (I call them) did not know.
1) Lufthansa said Airtag was banned:
"Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony"
2) Lufthansa clarified why it banned AirTag:
"According to ICAO guidelines, baggage trackers are subject to the dangerous goods regulations. Furthermore, due to their transmission function, the trackers must be deactivated during the flight if they are in checked baggage and cannot be used as a result. /Ana"
3) Lufthansa backtracked, implying that it was the government who was wrong and they only followed the rules:
"The German Aviation Authorities (Luftfahrtbundesamt) confirmed today, that they share our risk assessment, that tracking devices with very low battery and transmission power in checked luggage do not pose a safety risk. With that these devices are allowed on Lufthansa flights."
4) Lufthansa confirmed with NYT that AirTag was allowed after all.
All I can see is Lufthansa was wrong, double down, had to reverse the course with some vague excuses, and still haven't admitted they were wrong. What exactly is out of proportion? When they said they banned it without clear explanation, it inevitably opened the door to speculation, and lost luggage is an obvious explanation.
I have to question your bias against the media here. As for using "face plant", "awkwardly", don't you see the walking back earlier tweets, but not admitting error, as anything but awkward?
It's uncanny how all of the world's problems are either caused by lower-end employees or acts of god.
The higher the position, the more infallible they are.
That must be why higher-uos are paid the most: they are physically unable to do no wrong.
Lufthansa has not banned AirTags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134737 - Oct 2022 (247 comments)
Lufthansa bans AirTags in checked luggage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127459 - Oct 2022 (599 comments)
Come on Ars...
The character Jean Labadie is a good storyteller, who spins a vivid tale about a black dog, which doesn't actually exist. The people in his village believe it and start spreading rumors about it. People claim to have seen it, and even to have been bitten by it. Calls grow louder for something to be done about the ferocious animal as the false rumor spreads out of control. In the end, Jean has to shoot the nonexistent animal to calm the uproar.
That said, that brings a lot of logistical complication and cost, and won't happen anytime soon.
The story was all over HN and other sites.
Following up on what the actual policy is and how wonky it is to announce on your official twitter "Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony" and later having to clarify that it wasn't accurate ...
All that seems like legitimate news.
Not saying banning it is right/wrong, just that there definitely is a way of detecting them if you really want to.
How would you stop someone from taking out the battery and replacing it after security, or cross airline luggage transfer of devices with AirTags?
Enforcement of a ban without customs level scrutiny seems impractical.
It would be more difficult to implement than say banning bringing a gallon of water.
Question would be how much compliance they would get, or mass non compliance that it becomes a hassle to deal with.
They clarified their guidelines to say that active transmitters were not allowed in the hold because they couldn't be put on to flight mode (pretty much correct according to ICAO guidelines), and then after all this blew up later clarified their position by confirming that AirTags do not count (also correct).
"Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony"
https://twitter.com/lufthansa/status/1578879849577385984
I think that's pretty explicit. Official policy somewhere else in the company might be different but it's hard to imagine how folks are supposed to know what is up when they say it clearly like that.
I'd suggest that their published guidelines are probably more reliable than the interpretation of those being communicated for convenience by customer service reps. That's not to say this didn't have an impact, it clearly did, and customers should be able to trust this, but most of the reporting on this has treated it like an active decision to ban a particular device by a large company, rather than a misinterpretation by one individual in response to a question about a specific device.
I'm not sure what makes you think this is not a customer service interaction?
"Don't believe our official twitter account if you think customer service is involved?"
I have trouble faulting anyone for believing what was a very clear statement on their official twitter account.
I see this interaction as closer to a customer service phone call where a rep got something wrong, and the only fallout should be that I as one single customer am now misinformed. The amount of checks and balances to ensure that messaging is correct doesn't need too high as it's low risk if one customer is misinformed. Whereas if Lufthansa makes a full statement they should expect all customers to be misinformed, or expect the press to pick it up.
This brings me back to my original point. I don't think the press reported on this well, because this was clearly not an official statement prepared for the press or the audience of all customers, with the level of thinking about it that should go into that sort of thing. It was clearly (to me) an isolated thing. The correct course of action for a journalist would be to confirm with Lufthansa, which appears not to have happened.
This is circular reasoning. Nowhere is it established that Twitter is a customer service channel.
Other parts of your in your first paragraph makes sense, but are also non-obvious and reflect expertise and evidence collecting on your part.
Plenty of large companies do also use Twitter for PR rather than customer service.
Unless clearly stated otherwise, there is no reason for anyone to treat an official Twitter account as anything other than an official statement by a corporation, no different from their official blog, or website.
However, in my experience of ~14 years on Twitter, seeing support processes inside companies, and as a consumer, I think most consumers treat any two-way comms channel from a company as customer support regardless of whether the company is providing it. Many even treat review websites as customer support, despite it being wholly inappropriate for that.
Companies do support on Twitter because their customers are treating it like that, not the other way around.
This wasn't even an interpretation, they say outright they're banning them.
There were some folks in the media who reached out to PR people at the airline, some got "don't know" others were told "that's not our policy" ... but nobody updated the official twitter account for a while.
I agree 100%, just a mistaken tweet could have been solved with a timely new tweet.
It's also been fairly well understood for a while now that Bluetooth is not a concern on flights, and it uses an ISM radio frequency which is specifically set aside so as to not interfere with things like planes and other critical communications infrastructure.
"picking up service from multiple cell towers" seems like a guess if it's solely based on the above words, and also that's pretty different from planefuls of people arriving and overwhelming a tower.
Just that 99% of normal people were probably not even aware.of this topic but hey online hate
I don't want to entrust my life and my baggage to a company so incompetent.
- https://twitter.com/lufthansa/status/1578879849577385984
Certainly you can understand why people thought they did though, right?
If they really did it like mentioned than they did everything right: banning it then analysing it and then greenlighting it
If the analysis would have shown an issue you would have been protected BY Lufthansa and standing up vs just not caring.
Now you are assigning an emotional context ("entrust my life", "incompetent") to a simple question of if Airtags apply?
That doesn't appear to be what they said:
> (Lufthansa has)"one fatal air crash, one non-fatal crash, and two hull losses noted since 1989" (1)
(1) JACDEC, https://www.jacdec.de/Order/2021_JACDEC_AIRLINE_RISK_RANKING...
Point taken, though - you could say that the PiC of that flight might not have been had they better process/procedures.
even supposing the stories were true and accurate, if this is enough to get you to never use an airline, which ones are left for you to use?