15th Apr 2019 by Samantha Walker

10 Yetis Examples of Good and Bad PR - Monday 15thApril 2019

Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for. Game of Thrones has returned and, according to the news, as many as one billion people tuned in to the first episode of season 8 from around the world. What makes this number even more impressive is that in 2017 there were reportedly 7.53 billion in the world!

Don’t worry; there will be no spoilers here. I’m also going to be ducking and diving the internet today to avoid any spoilers before I can get home and watch the episode. So let’s dive right on with today’s good and bad PR…

Good PR

Guinness has announced they will be ditching as much as 400 tonnes of plastic waste a year. Their multipacks of cans will now be sold in cardboard packs as early as August 2019 in Ireland and summer 2020 for the rest of Britain.

Diageo, the multinational alcoholic beverages company which owns Guinness as well as Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker and Baileys, are champions of eradicating plastic. They made the step to phase out plastic straws, stirrers and single-use plastic bottles from their sites from 2017 onwards, and in 2018 they set themselves the target of only using 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable plastic from 2025.

These dates make it sound like the initiative is still a long way out, but it takes time to introduce these across a large multinational company.

Bad PR

Can we all just take a moment to wonder how TF a plane can take off from an airport and fly to its destination WITHOUT its passengers?! That’s exactly what passengers on easyJet’s EZY8717 wondered recently.

The flight was going from Gatwick to Lisbon on Friday but was diverted to Porto briefly because of a closed runway. The passengers were allows to get off the plan while it was being refuelled for their own comfort, but hours later were informed their plane had refuelled and left without them. More hours later and they were bundled onto replacement buses, arriving into Lisbon eight hours later than they should have.. six hours after their plane made it their without them!

EasyJet gave some excuse about cabin crew exceeding their legal working hours and then making the decision to continue on with an empty plane so that they could continue to use it, but what about their stranded passengers?! I don’t always believe in the phrase “the customer is always right”, but in this instance easyJetdidn’t think about their passengers, not once. They thought about their profits. They thought about their own deadlines. Well what about the plans the passengers had?! They had places to be and things to do. They had transfers to meet, hotels to book into and that’s eight hours of their holiday they’ll never get back.

They better get their cheque book ready; they’ve got some serious compensation to be paying out.

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