The Airline that Tweets

Got up early this morning (well it seemed early after visiting a Galway pub last night to drink and listen to a music session), to hear Padraig O’Ceidigh, Chairman of Aer Arann. Very inspirational speaker, and all done without visual aids - just the powerpoint slides in our brains! He described it as not a lecture, but a workshop with him doing all the work.

He talked about vision, strategy and the importance of people - "your biggest asset is not on your balance sheet". We should develop our personal vision and strategy by answering the following question. What is the world with you, compared to the world without you ? Do you make a difference? Could you make it more significant? If so how? If not, why not?

In developing a work strategy the focus should always be in the customer and how to improve services. He flies with his own airline, because he wants to know what it's like to fly with them, what it's like to be delayed etc.

I have first hand experience of some of the things they offer, as I flew with them from Manchester to Galway on Tuesday. The flight was delayed, and I've already told you I don't like Turbo-prop planes. But for me the two things that stuck out were that I got a text on Tuesday morning telling me the flight had been delayed, the estimated departure time and what time check in had been moved to, and when I landed there in my Twitter inbox was a tweet from @aerarann asking me how the flight had been. Very impressive.