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Folks at an airport parking company made a pretty egregious error in judgment when they decided to send out a national marketing email on Monday that used the recent death of a man as a lead-in for a parking discount. It was even received by their customers who fly out of Bob Hope Airport in Burbank.
Just got an email from @airport_parking trying to increase business by taking advantage of a man's death at O'Hare pic.twitter.com/SrhSsfCN3r
— Kburr (@Kburr) September 22, 2014
AirportParkingReservation.com's email, which referenced a man who was found dead at a Chicago O'Hare parking lot on Sept. 15, basically warned that you could die from traveling stress. And to them, the best way to avoid that is to use their $5 coupon that they included in the email on your next parking reservation! Oh, and they got really creative with this disturbing tagline: "Don’t be late and end up in a crate." The email reads:
Last week a 55 year old man was found dead at a Chicago O’Hare parking lot. He was found lying on the ground unresponsive at around 7:15 am. The Chicago police did not find any signs of a homicide and an autopsy is to follow. There could be many reasons for the cause of this man’s death, but based on the story one possible reason could be stress. The process of arriving to the airport, getting through security, and boarding the plane can be very stressful.
Many airlines and travel industries have implemented technology to make traveling easier such as through buying airfare online, booking hotels and renting cars, and even reserving off-airport parking through an app.
Don’t be late and end up in a crate. Save stress and possibly anything worse by utilizing technology and reserving all your travel needs in advance.
AirportParkingReservation.com quickly apologized, sending out a second email to their customers, titled, "We Are Sincerely Sorry." On the company's blog, they wrote this today:
On behalf of AirportParkingReservations.com and ParkSleepFly.com, we cannot emphasize how apologetic we are about the marketing email that went out on September 22, 2014. It was an extremely poor choice and a mistake that leaves us all in remorse. There is no good explanation to how and why we made the decision to create such a tasteless marketing email. It was clearly a poor choice on our end and we never had the intention to hurt or disrespect anyone. From the bottom of our hearts, we sincerely apologize for all the anger and emotional distress we have caused to the family of the deceased, the public and our customers.
[h/t: Mediaite]
