An AirAsia passenger forced the plane’s cabin staff to prostrate before her autistic daughter, took a photo of the whole scene and then posted it on social media. The whole situation seems to have angered the airline crew.

Reactions from social media and online communities drew lot of public interest to this personal ‘post’ on social media. This brought a lot of comments against the action of the passenger and crew’s head. The controversy led to a debate that the policy “customer is god” or “customer is the first priority” is not always true or good.

The whole situation began when the passenger complained that the crew had insulted her autistic daughter, and demanded that the staff prostrate before her daughter to make amends. This became a case of violation of the crew’s human rights as well.

The online community reacted strongly to this outrage. As their curiosity went out of bounds and they started investigating information, the passenger closed her Facebook account.

Not only the passenger, even the head of the airline crew was condemned by the public for forcing their crew to prostrate before the passenger’s daughter without any investigation.

A lawyer Kerdphol Kaewkerd posted on his Facebook that to force someone to prostrate before a customer is against the law. He used the hashtag ‘customer is not god’.

Here is some feedback on this drama:

@Thai_Talk: Hope the learning includes no one should have to prostrate before anyone for real or perceived slights. It’s 2016.

@Ryn_writes: Thai AirAsia dramatic case. Mostly translated based on @i5PAAN summaries. #Passengerfromhell. AirAsia Thailand massively fails in dealing with human rights abuse issue that one of their staff faced.

The extent to which the situation ballooned out of control is evident from the fact that the airline’s chief executive officer flew down to Thailand to address the issue.

CEO of AirAsia Tony Fernandes posted on his Twitter account [@tonyfernandes] that ‘Thai staff all had good intentions. Our crew did nothing wrong and we stand by her and she gets my full support. We need to improve and learn.’

Fernandes planed to fly to Hat Yai to meet the crew’s parent to extend his apology but they refused to meet the CEO.

Meanwhile, many people on social media recently launched a campaign on change.org, seeking the withdrawal of AirAsia Airlines from being nominated “The World’s Best Low-Cost Airlines”, arguing there were concerns about security and human rights abuse of one of its employees. This campaign aims to have 39,500 names, which is 100 times the number of reviews of AIrAsia on SKYTRAX website, http://www.airlinequality.com/.

This case is an example of people using social media to strongly make their case in favour of a victim or to attack the perpetrator.

For a company, this case is an example of the dangers its image could face and how it should handle a crisis in the social media era. Today, social media has empowered every single individual to serve as a media and inform the public.