Delta Refuses to Use "You"

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Students will easily rewrite this Delta Airlines message by applying business writing principles. Using “you,” tightening, clarifying information, and reorganizing would improve the email. Delta’s reputation suffered greatly during the outage, and emails like this one to customers don’t help.

Here are a few changes students might make:

  • Clarify the main point. The email subject was “Important Information About Your Upcoming Flight,” but the message has no information about the upcoming flight. The focus is something like, “How to Get Flight Updates and Rebook if You Need To.”

  • Sharpen the first paragraph. This is a slog to read, partly because of the language but mostly because it’s giving mixed messages. Maybe change to something like, “Your flight is scheduled as planned. But outages have caused cancellations, and here’s what you need to do if your flight is cancelled.” Maybe move the bit about the app to a separate line with bold type. That’s the first thing customers should do.

  • Use conversational language. Change “The operation of your flight” to “Your flight.” We know it’s operating—or not.

  • Use “you.” The writer seems to avoid speaking directly to the audience. Change “When rebooked travel occurs” to “If you rebook your travel,” and “customers may cancel their reservation” to “you may cancel your reservation.”

  • Eliminate bullets. Single bullets are not logical; bullets, like subheadings, divide something into multiple parts. A different visual design might be more appealing and more easily read.

  • Eliminate numbering. Numbers indicate a hierarchy or sequence. Again, a different visual design might help.

  • Clarify fares. That last bullet refers to “end of ticket validity,” which sounds confusing. Some tightening might help here too: Do we need “applicable fare difference”? Maybe better language for #3 is something like, “If you can’t rebook [why introduce “reschedule” here? Or is that something different?] within __ [define], don’t worry. You have up to one year to use whatever part of a ticket you don’t use for this trip.”

  • Skip the false politeness. Thanking customers for being patient or understanding assumes that they will be, which is unlikely in this situation. Maybe a sincere apology or an acknowledgement of the inconvenience (havoc!) would be better.

UPDATE: Contrast this message with a LinkedIn post from Shane Goronkin. He focuses on teamwork, sounds natural and sincere, and demonstrates compassion in the last two paragraphs (and defines IROP earlier):

Know that many of you have been impacted by this IROP and I am truly sorry. I heard countless heartbreaking stories over the weekend 😢. Really, really terrible.

We still have more work to do, but we will get back on track soon.