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Fly the Unfriendly Skies
United Airlines has a PR nightmare on its hands as a disturbing video burned up the Internet. After overbooking the flight from Chicago to Louisville, the crew chose four passengers at random to leave the flight. Passenger number three was a doctor who said he needed to treat patients in the morning, so refused to leave. The flight crew called security, which forcibly yanked him out of his seat and dragged him down the aisle.
This being 2017, several passengers recorded the whole thing on their smartphones:
@united @FoxNews @CNN not a good way to treat a Doctor trying to get to work because they overbooked pic.twitter.com/sj9oHk94Ik
— Tyler Bridges (@Tyler_Bridges) April 9, 2017
Airline staff first tried a carrot before using a stick. Before boarding, they offered passengers $400 and a hotel stay to give up their seats. Once boarded, they doubled it to $800 and said the flight wouldn’t leave until four people were gone. When no one volunteered, a computer selected four passengers at random.
With condemnation raining down on the airline, United’s CEO issued a statement:
Using the term “re-accommodate” to describe forcibly dragging a customer off a plane only fueled the online firestorm.
How should United have reacted in this situation and what can they do to fix it?
Published in Culture
I was told many years ago that the reason the airlines would sell more tickets than seats (and get away with it) was because passengers would book multiple flights, and only pay for the one that they actually took. Is this still true?
Makes sense as long as you pay for the seat. If it’s yours whether or not you’re in it, you need to pay for it. No refunds.
If they’re that critically short of crew members in any location they fly into or out of, it’s their fault. Don’t have an extra four people to cover the next day? Find another crew that can make it from somewhere else. Put together a systemwide bonus system with your own employees, so they can cover you for your mistakes while making a nice bit of extra change.
As other people have mentioned above, United could have just kept upping the payment to stay overnight. I got $800 to delay for just three hours on another airline last year. I flew home on American Airlines yesterday, and I would have delayed a day if they’d offered me that much + hotel, even though I REALLY wanted to get home.
OOOOOOOps. Nice going United. I was VERY pleased at the horror so well expressed by the other passengers. Amongst other little things I see a G I AN T L A W S U I T.
This is ugly, ugly, and United will get a lot of (deserved) bad press out of this. I hate when this happens – people asked to leave when they’ve booked and paid for a seat. They need to step back and reassess their policies.
But I have to wonder what was going on with this man. He refused to leave, it look multiple men to drag him off, and (according to some news sources) he kept repeating “just kill me”. This is not rational for anyone over 4 years old.
I once sat next to a person who was removed after he sat down because the pilot said we were overweight. This wasn’t a small plane (CJR700 about 70 passengers). I thought – what is the difference of 69 passengers vs 71 passengers, and how would the pilot know? The guy was maybe 175 lbs, and I am a 250 lbs. I was happy it wasn’t me, but it seems like the airlines can basically do what they want, and fairly randomly.
You can imagine that this would encourage passengers to hold out for more and more money.
But then I can also imagine airlines not over booking.
“re-accommodate”? That is priceless. I’m going to try using that around here and she how it works out.
I fly a lot. They overbook at lot and this causes problems for people. I understand both sides of the issue, but tend to have the most sympathy with the passenger whose paid for a flight on a specific day for a reason, and have made plans based on these reservations.
The thing is – they had the legal right to deny him that seat (much as I hate to say it), and that man didn’t have the right to stay.
As a member of the flying public I ask: do you really want to reinforce his behavior?
Yes, I was offended by his choice of words. These people can’t get out of their own way!
Ah – then that is even less acceptable.
As far as I know you always lose money on a scheme like that because the change fees are $200 on all airlines now (except Southwest). And they generally don’t offer refunds for missed or cancelled flights unless you paid more up front for a “refundable” ticket (which they will still take a $200 fee from before refunding it).
Their prevailing attitude seems to be “Flying would be so easy and such fun if it weren’t for the passengers!”
Hold out too long and you miss out because another passenger will jump at it. If there is a concern of this taking too long, they can simply start the bidding higher. I’ll call out of work and spend a day at the airport for $1500.
This is the more likely outcome. The libertarian in me hates how incidents like this are going to eventually lead to laws forbidding the over booking of flights. The cynic in me is saying “you were asking for it, airlines.”
This! If there are, say, 100 seats on a plane and all seats are sold, the airline makes that money no matter if the passenger shows up or not. This kind of business practice should be criminal. You cannot sell what you don’t have, kind of like in contract law, you cannot promise more than you have to give.
You calling for laws?
I like what Ben Shapiro said:
I always try to get to the bottom of a story like this and it upsets me that there are two versions. Jon, you told one of them, but the other is far worse.
The other story I heard was not that it was “oversold” but that United had to get four of their employees to that city by the morning. Imagine being in the grocery store with the last gallon of milk when the manager walks over, snatches it from your hand, and hands it to the stock-room boy because he “needs it to have cereal tomorrow so he can be at work in the morning.”
Someone said that United should have just upped the price. I think that would have solved it. At about $2,000 plus a flight tomorrow, plus a good room in a good hotel plus meals, my desire to be on that particular flight would have disappeared and I would have leaped to be the first out the exit.
Their desire to be cheap, then the decision to go Nazi on the good doctor, will result in a lawsuit that will result in millions of lost revenue.
They are all about prices getting set by the forces of supply and demand … But only when they are on the profitable end of the market. In the overbooked scenario they are the ones with the immediate, pressing demand and the fannies in the seats have the monopoly supply. Suddenly the airlines don’t like market pricing.
All this just to go to Louisville? And it’s not even Derby week.
I have no problem whatsoever with overbooking. It’s just part of a contract, and everyone knows it’s part of the deal when they buy their ticket even without reading the fine print. Don’t like it? Find another way to travel (which many indeed do).
What disturbs me much more is the fact that most of the rules regarding booking/overbooking/bumping/passenger reimbursement/etc. are apparently codified in US law. In other words, overbooking and bumping isn’t just something you agree to with an airline when you buy the ticket and blindly click on the “I agree” button before checkout – it’s regulated to the nines and set in stone.
I would greatly prefer more flexibility in these conditions – perhaps some cheap fares in exchange for being among the first to get bumped (with less or no compensation), and more expensive fares that guarantee your seat.
Overbooking flights reminds me of this bit:
https://youtu.be/4T2GmGSNvaM?t=38s
.
It’s not a monopoly supply if you have 100 different actors. Passengers can also get competitive once the incentives get offered.
I’ve seen many examples of 10 people or more rushing the gate agent when they ask for 2-3 volunteers willing to get bumped overnight in exchange for hotel and a $250 credit.
Have non-refundable tickets. If the seat is sold, it is sold. If the plan flies with an empty seat, they still get money.
Someone could probably run an airline based on being 100% clear booking / ticket / amenity policies.
I don’t fly United if it can be at all avoided. I rather like Delta, but American will do in a pinch. This just reinforces my current business practices (it isn’t just that United Breaks Guitars, it is also that I find their planes very uncomfortable).
Overbooking likely goes with the territory for large planes going to hubs -because many of the seats are connections, it is not the case that the airline gets paid whether you sit in the seat or not. Airlines will rebook passengers if the reason they miss the connection is a delay on the airlines’ side. I have been in that situation multiple times, and American and Delta have always been happy to rebook me at no charge.
Likewise, the deadheading rules are probably necessary given FAA requirements and how tightly the airlines run their budgets (it isn’t, near as we can tell, an industry that makes a lot of money). But that also means that an $800 incentive to deplane is a ridiculous lowball. Chicago had a stockyard, which means I’m sure they have auctioneers. Get one of them up at the front of the cabin to explain the situation and then say “who will give me their seat for $500? Who will do it for $800?” and so on up until you get a taker.
United has always has really poor business practices, that show lack of respect for the customer, poor hiring practices, poor training. I know of several cases where the plane for whatever reason doesn’t fly, the one I witnessed personally happened to my daughter. Then everyone gets in line to rebook. They needed to get to their destination today. For the first hour and a half only one employee shows up at the counter to handle a line of about 150 people. Then after lots of people give up or have been processed, a couple of more agents show up to handle the few who remain. They obviously need a crises team to man the counters and get everyone rebooked as quickly as possible. Obviously they prefer to agravate and irritate people. Maybe it is union rules?? I would love to know United’s version of the story. Oddly enough I personally have never heard stories like this about either Delta or American.
First reports of the story indicated that not only did United overbook the flight but they were bumping passengers to accommodate 4 United crew members who had to get to the next stop to crew another aircraft. This is going to be a lawsuit in the multiple of millions of dollars. It’s not hard to imagine that a judge and/or jury won’t feel compelled to hand down a severe penalty to the airline to set an example.
I find United’s seats to be torture devices. They have this bump the top of the seat- just where the back of my head is when seated, which pushes my head forward in a seriously uncomfortable position. I hate them! I’m convinced their designers are in the pay of my enemy!
Monopsony in the sense that the supply is limited to seats on this particular flight. Within that group of seated passengers there is competition.
Unfortunately, in this case a lawyer will argue that United created the conditions where a passenger was chosen at random and humiliated in front of other passengers for the crime of purchasing a ticket with the airline and then abused by security personnel – because the airline needed to fly 4 or of their employees to the flight’s destination on an overbooked flight. This will not end well for the airline despite what the fine print says on the airline ticket.
First you said the crew chose someone at random, then you said a computer did the chosing. It sounds like to me not all the facts are out on why these four people were chosen. Either way, the correct thing United should have done was promise they’d work their rear ends off to get the displaced passengers put on other flights, even if it was a different airline. Capitalism demands they up the ante until someone bites.
I’ve seen free tickets to anywhere in the world waved around before. There’s always someone that says, “The hell with seeing the grandkids today-we can see them tomorrow and go to Paree this fall!”
I haven’t flown since 2003, and will do all I can to never ever have to fly again (unless TSA hires Swedish bikini models to do the pat-down searches).