Last week, American Airlines was forced to cancel thousands of flights for maintenance to comply with FAA safety inspections. As a result, visits to www.aa.com reached their highest peak of the past twelve months, up 9% week on week and up 25% compared with a year earlier.

Yesterday, I looked at Hitwise clickstream data to see where people were going after visiting AA.com. My hunch was that people would visit other airline websites to look for alternate flights. My hunch proved wrong. We actually saw a decrease in traffic from AA.com to Commercial Airlines, Travel Agencies and Destinations & Accommodation websites. Instead, consumers were going from AA.com to websites for Email Services, Social Networks and News and Media.
While we saw a 12% decrease in downstream visits from AA.com to Travel websites, we saw a 19% increase in visits to News and Media websites, 13% increase to Email Services and a 74% in visits to Social Networking and Forums.
The American Airlines website asked customers who were inconvenienced by the canceled flights to send an email to request compensation. This likely accounts for the increase in visits to Email Services.
The increase to social networks is most interesting. MySpace was the #15 website visited after AA.com last week, up from #30 the week before. Last week 1 in 30 visits to AA.com left to go to a social network. This serves as a good reminder that customers broadcast their experience to friends. How American handled the cancellations and how they continue to handle claims is sure to be broadcast online – and affect their brand.