What were the dumbest moments in travel during the past year? The travel industry has spoken and the results of this TI100 survey are now complete. It seems the airlines rose to the top as the dumbest industry in travel, a few of the dumb moments cited were:

• The incredible ramping-up of all kinds of airline fees
• The NWA Flight 188 pilots who overshot Minneapolis
• The ‘United breaks Guitars’ fiasco
• The TSA threatening travel bloggers

Also cited by multiple respondents was the #FollowMeAtSea hashtag Princess Cruise controversy. It seems bloggers don’t like other bloggers to hijack hashtags.  Their was also a dislike of the use of words like staycations and other ”cations.”

Click thumbnails below to see individual responses or START SLIDESHOW

Willy Volk	Chris Christensen	Soultravelers3	Mara Gorman
Mark H.	Gary Arndt	Scott  Carmicahel	Kim Orlando
Anil Polat	Jessica Spiegel	Nancy D. Brown	Kara Williams
Mary Jo Manzanares

In summary, all of the dumbest moments cited by our experts have common threads, such as passengers demanding accountability, good service and value, with social media holding the company’s feet to the fire in case it screws up or doesn’t respond in a timely manner.

Also notable - as seen in the case of United’s tiff with Dave Carroll, is you need to put out a social media fire right at the beginning, and if you cannot, then rest assured that it will end up defining the company’s image.