Passenger paid Twitter to slam British Airways
A tweet about British Airways losing luggage on a flight from Chicago went viral after a passenger paid Twitter $1,000 to promote it in the UK and US.
The tweet, which Hasan Syed bought from Twitter’s self-service ad platform, received more than 76,000 impressions in a couple of days on the social media site.
It was picked up by news sites, including CNN in the US.
Syed, who uses the handle @HVSVN, followed up his initial tweet with a series of posts slamming BA for allegedly losing his parent’s luggage on the weekend trip to Paris.
Promoted tweets appear in search results for a promoted trend and can be retweeted by any Twitter users.
BA took four hours to respond to Syed via a direct message on Twitter that read: "Sorry for the delay in responding, our twitter feed is open 09:00-17:00 GMT. Please DM [direct message] your baggage ref and we’ll look into this."
A BA spokesperson said: "We would like to apologise to the customer for the delay in receiving his bag. We contacted the customer and delivered his bag yesterday."
Earlier today, Syed tweeted "I got what I wanted. I win."
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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