Canceling one flight | Seth’s Blog

Let’s imagine the airline you run had to cancel just one flight a year. You have three days notice. How would you go about it?

You might begin by considering the travelers with the tightest itineraries, and explore which options exist and prioritize them.

Then, this being late-stage capitalism, you might look at the passengers who are paying you the most, or are the highest-value customers. You’d prepare alternative plans for them, and, in clear language, make it easy for them to switch with just one click.

And you’d expand your staff, just a bit, so the dozen or so people who can’t be served by your well-designed self-service model would be able to call or text in real time.

Add it all up, and the overhead you’d need to create a layer of customer-service around a cancelled flight (with $180,000 in revenue) isn’t that much.

With tech tools and training, your team could save long-planned-for trips and salvage customer loyalty.

Multiply it by the 3,000 or so flights that KLM cancels every year and it seems like a big number. Which is why it’s the accountants, not the marketers, that create so much chaos.

Start with one.

Your scale should not be your customer’s problem.

September 14, 2026