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Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

Classic. Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation.

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.

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Then maybe it's time that lower-level customer service reps stop running official company twitter accounts. Maybe you and I see it differently, but most of the world sees a company's twitter account as the official source of information and fast-paced updates. It has as much significance as a press release from the CEO or an announcement on the company website. So if the lower-level customer service rep fucks up, outrage is warranted because they should have gotten someone more competent to run the account in the first place.

You're going after the wrong people here. Journalists hungry for clickbait can't wait for incompetent customer reps to tweet some stupid shit. So the "journalist" can blow it out of proportion. It's literally their bread and butter.

> You're going after the wrong people here. Journalists hungry for clickbait can't wait for incompetent customer reps to tweet some stupid shit. So the "journalist" can blow it out of proportion. It's literally their bread and butter.

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?

Normally I would agree with you.

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)

Social media managers form an important work program for executive's fail-nephews, so I don't think what you are suggesting is realistic.

"executive's fail-nephews" is still much better than what it really is, which is usually underpaid slaves in boiler rooms in third-world countries right next to the phone scam call centre.

Possibly.

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 ...

Companies want a Twitter account at all, but are forced into it because of customer expectations

I worked for a company who had sales running the twitter account.

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.

I think you're both right in different ways -- part of the problem is operations...

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.

> 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.

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.

Mistake happens. if the lower-level customer service rep fucks up, you just tweet again saying that it is wrong.

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.

No, outrage is warranted when countries go to war.

This kind of nonsense activism hurts us all.

That's now how I read this playing out at all...

>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.

Or the lesson is very little good can come for using Twitter as a medium for "news"

I think it was quite interesting news. If you took the airline at their word folks would want to know about that.

You get me read the article. Here is the timeline according to the article:

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 definitely scummy journalism, but there's also a little misunderstanding in how social media reps work in Germany vs elsewhere.

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.

> , they tend to operate with considerably more autonomy.

That's one way to put it.

Another way to put it is:

> They tend to operate without much oversight or ethical boundaries.

Anothernother way to put it is:

> They seem more approachable with possibly more positive interactions.

I'm not sure how to communicate this without making it sound biased.

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.

Ars has definitely gone downhill, both in-house stuff like this and in the spamming of other Cande Nast junk. What is today's Ars-of-10-years-ago?

I've been a paying subscriber since 2009 and I'm still happy with it. I agree this article is a dud and I could do without the Wired articles (thankfully they're easy to identify and skip even if you miss the by-line -- just look for the first paragraph that's all setup and zero content). But they still seem like a fine outlet for high-level science & tech news.

Agreed. Unfortunately there don’t appear to be any viable replacements. Ultimately I just read less in general now which sucks. I hate what the internet has become.

Ars in 2008 was the place where people found out you could run arbitrary floating point computations on a GPU. I've never heard anyone talking about it but without those forums deep learning would still be this thing that looks interesting but is really hard to train at scale and no one bothers with.

I do not know… it seems like Lufthansa messed up here.

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.

The normalization of clickbait everywhere is so disheartening. Including on HN. I have to click through to the comments and find the one correcting for the hyperbole and fake extreme emotions used in the title.

It is exhausting and I refuse to click through such titles - but nowadays that’s almost all of them.

I get what you are trying to say here and generally I agree with the context you are trying to add, but so long as corporate entities have personhood rights, I think we should treat the putative monoliths as what they claim to be for the purposes of assigning blame, otherwise we make it too easy to escape accountability.

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.

Yeah, Ars Technica has really gotten irritating over the past few years. I read the Rocket Report and that's about it these days.

You really believe that it’s because of a single rep? Then you also might also believe that most management disasters are “programming errors” like that sometimes say?

> You really believe that it’s because of a single rep? Then you also might also believe that most management disasters are “programming errors” like that sometimes say?

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.

You really BLASTED the media there, @InTheArena!

Yes - modern technology is making an objectively malformed economy and social signalling system.

Still crossing fingers that there is a viable solution to populism.

Lufthansa deserves it. Worst airline I've ever flown (and that's saying something being from Canada).

When it comes to airlines, you can pick any brand, and if you mention them, there will be at least one person who will chime in with a horror story and claim they're the worst airline.

And it's usually based on a single one-off bad experience.

Is AirCanada bad? I have a big flight on there in a few months (honeymoon) and it's gotten rescheduled numerous times but otherwise service has seemed fine.

I have had a nightmare dealing with their customer service. Hour and half holds, dropped calls, inconsistent messaging, losing my information (personal address e.g. despite it being on an incident tracking website), lack of communication, difficulty with partner airlines getting ahold of them.

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.

When things go right AC is fine. When things go wrong, do not expect anyone to have any empathy or be willing to help you in any way that is even slightly outside regular operating procedure.

> it's gotten rescheduled numerous times

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.

Yes, I'm sure one anecdotal experience turns it into the absolutely worse airline of planet Earth. Worse than Air Koryo even.

Most customer rankings disagree with you. Which doesn't mean the airline should be free from criticism, of course.

I mean when they lost our luggage as well as that of everyone else on the same connection they literally told us their computer tracking system was incompatible with that of their partner... On top of terrible treatment at the Frankfurt Airport, children running up and down the aisles for 10 hours straight on the plane, etc...

> 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...

Just another anecdote: They’re the only airline to lose my luggage, and their complete lack of giving a fuck or competence in returning it was a tremendous and expensive pain in the ass. Only through pulling a personal favor with a friend in Berlin was I able to ever get my luggage.

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.

Yeah you definitely deserve to complain about that experience. Though I've heard about tracking incompatibility issues (not with them though) - does not excuse the luggage loss of course

https://www.insider.com/woman-lost-luggage-lufthansa-twice-o...

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.

If they get you to point A->B without misconnecting, getting your bags there, and don't act angry with you. Still better than LH.

Air Koryo apparently offers more leg space than most Canadian airlines, and I have a feeling any staff getting caught stealing luggage would be in some deep shit. Food pics look decent too.

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.

It is my preferred Airline, but I'm usually flying business so maybe that's the difference

There was nothing wrong with the flight itself. Everything wrong with their online booking/check in system, disorganization at the terminal and lost luggage (apparently due to system incompatibility with a partner airline).

Yeah, not sure why this commenter is rushing to their defense. Out of all PR fumbles, this one is the fumblest.

easyjet wants a word

Would still fly with easyjet despite having a sour experience with them.

I will not consider LH metal for any reason.

one word: ryanair.

Of course fully anecdotal, but my experiences with ryanair have been mostly fine - the planes are shit and they try and sell you bollocks on board but they run on time and it all kinda works. Easyjet on the other hand... mamma mia, getting a refund out of them is a gauntlet, and at my local airport >50% (!!!!) of easyjet flights are delayed or cancelled.

Haha except expectations are managed (read low) with EasyJet or Ryanair. They deliver exactly what you pay for and expect.

> Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation.

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.

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