KLM Delivers A Great Customer Experience through Social Media

Originally posted by Maria Tuttocuore @ eTravel Project.

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Everybody is talking so highly about KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and their marketing initiatives that I wanted to test them in my last flight to Europe. I was at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol very early in the morning and checked in from my Android and mentioned @KLM. Both the airport and KLM were prompt to welcome me to Holland. On my way back to New York JFK, I pretty much did the same thing when I was in Amsterdam. By the way, I forgot to mentioned that I used the awesome service of 1-hour free Wi-Fi at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol from my Android and my iPad, which kept quite some good company in my 5-hour layover.

Photo credits - KLM

The next day I checked my frequent miles on my Alitalia MilleMiglia account and the flight New York JFK – Amsterdam did not collect any mile. About 3,600 miles were missing: weird! I contacted Alitalia by phone and they gave me an email address to send my request to, no reply. I contacted Alitalia via Twitter, no reply.

I bought the ticket at www.klm.com, but the flight from New York to Amsterdam was operated by Delta. I am pretty sure that Delta messed up at the check-in. I had to tell them that the code of their Sky Team partner airline is AZ several times.

So I decided to tweet @KLM and they replied almost right away with courtesy and professionalism asking for my Flying Blue number to see if they could add my missing miles. At the end, they realized they could do little: since I am a MilleMiglia member, only Alitalia can solve this issue. At that point, I did not care much anymore. They were nice and gave me an answer almost instantaneously. In the meantime, I had also faxed Alitalia with my e-ticket and MilleMiglia number, but still no reply from Alitalia.

Only a few days later, Alitalia calls me and asks for my boarding pass: without boarding pass, no miles. Guess what? I did not keep my boarding pass. Lesson learned: we still need to keep our boarding pass in our digital era for Alitalia , even if we can do online check-in. @KLM delivered a great customer experience though!