Tell customers the truth how radical
Telling customers the truth is generally actually smart but management is so used to working to prevent customers from knowing the truth that they mostly cannot bring themselves to try it.
Airlines never have delays longer than about 30minutes for example, but often have a lot of them in a row. I recall one case where the official announcement was that we would be boarding in 20 minutes but we could see the plane sitting waiting for an engine to be put back on which had no chance of being done in that time.