Abstract
he airline industry has faced major crises such as global health crises and aeroplane disasters over the years and continues to experience many daily challenges (Scheiwiller & Zizka, 2021). In South Africa, the airline industry recently experienced a number of grounding crises due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and technical issues. These crises had a large impact on the reputations of the airlines involved. Customers used social media to express their frustration and seek information about the incidents. While it is important for crisis managers to understand and make use of crisis communication strategies to repair their organisation’s reputation, they also need to be aware of the role that social media plays in communicating during a crisis. The reactions of stakeholders on social media during a crisis are unpredictable; therefore, the use of social media during a crisis may bring about new image management issues for an organisation and cause a secondary crisis (Liu & Fraustino, 2014; Wang et al., 2021). The purpose of this study was to analyse how a South African airline communicated online during a crisis, the words customers used on social media to express how they felt about the organisation’s communication efforts and to investigate the perceptions that the customers had about the airline during and after the crisis. The study used netnography as a research design to analyse Kulula’s communication and customer reactions on Twitter. Thematic analysis was used to uncover 10 themes, 4 from the communication from Kulula and 6 from the communication from customers. The results indicate that Kulula used the instructing and adjusting information from Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) as initial crisis response strategies and used a combination of diminishing and denying strategies to repair its reputation. Although Kulula made use of these strategies to communicate during the crisis, the results indicate that the perception that customers had about Kulula during and after the crisis was generally negative, with only a few customers empathising with the organisation during the crisis