British Airways paid the price for a losing a customer’s luggage when an irate passenger paid $1,000 to promote his Twitter tweet about the incident.
A tweet about the lost luggage on a flight from Chicago went viral after it was promoted in the U.K. and U.S.
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, and was picked up by news services including CNN.
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 a weekend trip to Paris.
Promoted tweets appear in search results for a promoted trend and can be retweeted by any Twitter user.
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 apologize 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."
