Obviously, there are tons of customer service stories out there. And I’m not the only blogger blogging about them on a regular basis. So now, every Thursday, you can find my personal roundup of rants and raves from around the blogosphere. This week is a bit of a special edition to highlight a major fail and major win recoup for the airline we all love to pick on because they’re so good at putting themselves out there: United Airlines.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned United in a social media post and embedded the world-famous United Breaks Guitars video by Dave Carroll. United’s latest snafu has to do with Step Davis, a professional climber and BASE jumper (among many other talents). On a trip back from Switzerland, United managed to lose her jumping gear – worth over $12k! She tells of the full experience in her blog (plus you get to see some pictures of some of the awesome – in the true sense of the word – stuff that she does).

Steph, of course, did her best in contacting United and trying to impress upon them the importance and value of this gear. They didn’t get it at first. And in the meantime, the Twitterverse sure let @UnitedAirlines know about it!

Whether it was due to the publicity and Tweep-support or to Steph’s relentless dedication in communicating with United to get her gear back, she is now going to be fully compensated for her lost gear! She writes another blog post explaining the details. Now, I don’t know if United managed to recover Steph as a customer, but they did manage to do the right thing and resolve the situation. As one of Steph’s Tweeps said, it’s important to Tweet the good and the bad – it’s only fair to the company, especially after a “slip-up” such as this.

I’d love to hear others’ opinions (rants and/or raves!) about United Airlines.  I’ll admit I have a huge chip on my shoulder when it comes to United*, so I really would like to hear if someone thinks differently about them!

*Gotta love their “give us more money and we’ll give you lots of luxurious leg room” upgrade option. Did ya think we wouldn’t notice where that extra legroom came from? The plane sure as heck didn’t get longer, and I’m fairly sure that you didn’t take any rows of seats out. I did notice, however, that my “cattle-class” seat had even less legroom than before. Thanks, United, for making people with long legs, overweight people (You get to pay twice! Even if we have extra seats!), and people who like to bring luggage with them feel extra-special! Way to enhance the user experience for some of your customers!

But it’s not the only thing companies need to focus on! What about all the complaints lodged by consumers on YouTube? Just check out the search results I got for “horrible customer service”. There’s quite a few, and “horrible” is only one possible adjective you could search with! The old maxim that a happy customer will tell one person and an unhappy customer will tell ten friends . . . well, the internet just multiplies things. Unhappy customers aren’t just telling ten friends, they’re telling anyone who will listen. And the offending company had better be listening so they can do some damage control!

Here are a few examples of how YouTube has been used by consumers to express their unhappiness about the customer service – or lack thereof – they received:

United Airlines Breaks Guitars

Dave Carroll, the musician whose guitar was broken, explains the whole story on his website. He also includes United’s response. And to be fair to United, he’s made a statement video on YouTube as well:

Hilton Hell

This one’s a personal contribution from a lovely business trip I took with Cia Romano.

I think we still have yet to get a response to the video, but that’s up to the Hilton. However, Cia and I would both like to thank the staff of the Hilton Arlington, especially Henry the bellman, who did their best in trying to make do with the hotel they work in.