Southwest Airlines

Recently Southwest Airlines was ridiculed for kicking a 23 year-old college student off of a flight for wearing scantly clad clothing. Their PR team saved them. Instead of allowing the press to blow all of this way out of proportion, the way they always do, they decided to make it into a joke.

The airlines apologized to the girl, and then began running advertising campaigns making fun of the incident. They also encouraged other women in short skirts to fly Southwest as often as they like.

Radio programs around the nation were also having a ball with the incident, planning stunts where they would gather dozens of short skirted girls onto a southwest flight, just to fly them to a city close to them for lunch.

I must say, as a frequent flyer, I was pretty amused by the whole situation. I wanted to specifically dress risque and go on a Southwest flight, just to see what would happen.

From a PR standpoint, I believe that Southwest did the right thing. They didn't make a scene of it, they just apologized and played along. Really, in a situation like that, you can either make light of it or hold to your flight attendants thoughts on the customers attire and make it a serious matter that the media would eat up.

The best thing was done, and now the situation isn't really talked about anymore. It maybe got two days of negative attention from the media, and the rest after that was all positive thanks to the Southwest PR staff.