Snow is like Marmite: you either love it or you hate it!
If you wanted to travel by plane or train on Friday or over the weekend – passengers dreaded hearing two words – cancelled and delayed. And, as feared, the UK transport system was hard hit with severe disruptions on journeys. Hundreds of flights were cancelled leaving air passengers stranded at airports and rail disruptions peaked leading to many commuters choosing to work from home.
We took a look at the social media discussion around one of the train operating companies which had to suspend some services during the white-out – South West Trains.
Looking at the buzz volume chart from Thursday until yesterday, it’s obvious that snow affected many of its train passengers over the weekend. You can see that the number of mentions peaked on Friday at 2,668. This coincided with when the snow was coming down at its heaviest.
By using the Sentiment Metrics social media monitoring tool, we looked at some of the mentions discussing South West Trains to find out what was driving the conversation.
Some social media users highlighted South West Trains’ efforts to plan ahead (some with a little humour added):
Whilst many others criticised the train line for not being able to cope:
Some people also ridiculed the company’s approach to the travel disruptions:
So, South West Trains may have done the right thing by pre-warning passengers of revised timetables and cancellations prior to the snow fall by spreading the word through its official Twitter account with some help from National Rail:
However, many of its passengers were still unhappy and often none the wiser about what the current situation was when the snow actually hit. It appears South West Trains still has some work to do in terms of its social media engagement in times of crisis. Engaging with a social media monitoring tool to listen to customers in real-time during unplanned disruption is invaluable, as is a post-event analysis of what customers were saying to help plan for next time.