Friends in High Places: Airlines on Facebook

2009/06/18 · By Dan Levy

From the folks who brought you the definitive list of tweeting airlines, here’s our roundup of airlines using Facebook. The flight industry is all over the social network, posting fleet photos, responding to customer queries and advertising flight sales. Like a big, chaotic airport, the experience can be both exciting and frustrating.

Searching Facebook for “airlines” yields more than 500 results, including official “pages” (which are administered by airline staff) and unofficial “groups” (which can be started by fans or off-duty employees). This can get confusing, since groups and pages look the same, and since some groups seem to serve as official pages, while some pages claim to be “unofficial.” To make things messier, some companies have multiple accounts (EL AL Airlines has three pages) while some have plenty of friends, but no content to show for it (Delta Air Lines has 7,570 fans but no updates).

Online social networking requires companies to relinquish a certain amount of control, and some airlines are letting go more than others. American Airlines’ wall is populated by messages from customers, some disgruntled (“We need to start a movement against AA and their GROSSED out 757s (domestic)… How do we do this…”). Other companies, such as Royal Brunei Airlines, simply recycle content from their website.

There’s also the messy issue of employee pages. Pilots, flight attendants and airport staff – both former and current – have created their own spaces on Facebook to keep in touch. These pages are usually open to the public and branded with airline logos, making them indistinguishable at first glance from official pages. This can be a recipe for a PR fiasco: in November, Virgin Atlantic Airlines fired 13 flight attendants who criticized the airline’s safety standards and dissed its passengers on Facebook. On the other hand, is there any better or cheaper publicity than a spontaneous employee love-in?

Below is our list of airlines that have an official Facebook presence (with their current number of friends in parentheses). Let us know if we’ve missed any and we’ll add them to the list:

Aegean Airlines (572)
Aer Lingus (885)
Air Asia (3,415)
Air Canada (8,959)
Air France (2,275)
Air New Zealand (1,403)
Alaska Airlines/Horizon Air (2,652)
Allegiant Air (296)
American Airlines (10,954)
Arabian Airlines (194)
Asiana Airlines (254)
ATA (defunct) (547)
Atlantic Southeast Airlines (558)
Austrian Airlines (1,129)
Austrian Airlines Srbija (183)
Avensa (467)
Axis French Airlines (106)
Azerbaijan Airlines (976)
B&H Airlines (655)
Blue Panorama Airlines (106)
British Airways (219)
Brussels Airlines (1,495)
Cargolux Airlines International (480)