I agree. I am hoping that at least some of the media outlets that covered the story last week will follow up in the near future and put Continental on the spot to find out what, if anything, they have done to prevent recurrences. A Houston Chronicle reporter claimed to me that she would do just that, since the story is of particular interest to her readers because Continental’s headquarters is in Houston.

Independent of that, because realistically the media probably will not put sufficient pressure on Continental to force them to make lasting changes, I have begun conversations with Senator John Kerry to try to get his office to to spearhead efforts to (a) figure out if any Federal regulations were violated by what happened, (b) if so ensure that Continental is fined or otherwise “punished” appropriately for the violations, (c) if not figure out what laws or regulations need to be enacted so that the next time something like this happens, it will be a violation, and (d) figure out what laws or regulations need to be enacted in general to make it safer for unaccompanied minors to fly.

We think that if the immediate crisis, ie the lost child being located, is over, that the airline would considerate it no longer an urgent, although certainly a timely matter.

An large corporation like Continental surely understands how quickly a PR disaster can spiral out of control and how important it is to get out in front of it to prevent that from happening. They surely have not only people on call on the weekends to deal with safety emergencies, but also people on call on the weekends to deal with PR emergencies. The fact that they didn’t kick the PR machine into high gear until Monday afternoon, after the TV stations started to call them (the first TV station to call their PR office, at noon on Monday, was told that they were unaware of the incident and had no comment about it), is yet another indication that they did not take the incident seriously enough.

And, for that matter, that they underestimated me.

We do acknowledge that you achieved a successful media campaign that has a good chance of pressuring Continental to seriously deal with this. The problem is that most airlines, in fact many businesses in general, react to situations like this in a limited capacity. They solve the immediate problem, but don’t look at preventing the broader problem.

We do not think that it is an assertion about no one being available on a weekend. We think that if the immediate crisis, ie the lost child being located, is over, that the airline would considerate it no longer an urgent, although certainly a timely matter. We emphasize, that is how we think they would see it, we do not exactly agree.

Our perspective is that they handled it badly at every level, and continue to do so by minimizing the incidents in public statements. We do agree with you that organizations often have to be embarrassed or pressured into doing what they should do, which is certainly a sad reflection on the state of things in the world.

Ultimately, we believe you took advantage of an option many wouldn’t, and we admire you for that. Too often people don’t stand up and fight in these situations. Being as it is not clear-cut, we wonder if the solution to a company providing us with horrible service is to immediately be on the defensive. We fear eventually all business relations will begin to turn into us versus them.

Of course, we admit that is a broader view that is not relevant to this specific story. We can’t change the universe. We can only effect small parts of it.

A few comments:

* If anyone from the airline had given me reason to believe on Sunday that they considered the incident serious, I would not have escalated to the media as I did. No such indication was forthcoming, frankly because I don’t believe the airline *does* consider such incidents serious, at least not serious enough.

* I disagree with your assertion that there was no one available on a weekend to which the incident could be escalated. I am sure that every airline has senior management people on call for responding to crises on weekends, and I consider a lost child to be just such a crisis. The fact that the airline employees with whom we dealt did not is part of the problem.

* Once it was clear that the airline did not consider this a serious incident, escalation of the incident to the media as soon as possible became critical. The media only likes fresh stories. Every minute older a story gets makes it less likely that the media will be interested in covering it. I stand by my decision to contact the media late Sunday night. If I had waited another day, the media saturation of the incident probably would not have occurred, and my goal, to use bad publicity to pressure Continental into changing their policies and procedures, would not have been achieved.

* As I noted on my blog, the suggestions for process changes to make this type of incident less likely were devised by my wife, not by me. I don’t wish to take credit for someone else’s work.