Also note that this particular problem was not really solved via public Twitter messages but rather with DMs. It’s not that I complained publicly and Air NZ tried to avoid more damage or I threatened anyone by saying…”if you don’t fix this I’m going public” or anything. Someone at Air NZ recognized the problem and genuinely wanted to help me getting it resolved.

And re your question how the story would have panned out had I not used Twitter: I would have escalated the problem up the food chain. Would have called (in my case) the premium customer hot-line, put in a formal complaint about their approach or something. Obviously that takes potentially longer than feeding it in in from “the side”. But the interesting thing is – with Air NZ I find that this formal approach is normally not even necessary (it IS with most other airlines). Most times I dealt with CSRs on the phone for instant it’s perfectly fine. Besides being polite and nice they’re actually genuinely trying to help you and I think with having done numerous hot-line calls, I just once had a CSR that was really impossible to work with and I had to ask for the person’s supervisor.