text:
Sid Banerjee and a colleague had been stranded at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport for several hours in April. The tech company chief executive had missed his connecting flight, was resigned to missing his meeting and was just trying to get back to Washington.
"I could not get someone to reroute me back home," Banerjee said. After fruitless hours trying to get assistance over the phone or at the ticket counter, his colleague, who did not want to be identified, turned to Twitter. "We said, 'We should tweet about it,'" Banerjee said.
He had a strong hunch they might get some kind of response. Their company, Clarabridge, sells social media analytics software to travel companies. Twitter, he figured, might give him a digital backdoor.
"Social in particular, because it's not the dominant path for communication between customers and airlines, does tend to have a shorter queue," he said.
This article is a fragment originally published on traveller.com.au and can be read in full here.