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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
Good point.
This happened to my son once years ago. (Not after he had boarded the plane, however.) Northwest gave him a night in a hotel very near the Minneapolis airport, near enough to the Mall of America that he could stroll around there for the evening. A very nice dinner. A lovely hotel room on the grounds of the airport. And then he took a flight out in the morning. He was in college at the time, and he actually enjoyed the whole thing. And the airlines were very nice to him because he was so pleasant about it.
Overbooking is amusing when the story ends the way it did for my son.
So I’m back to my original point. United’s upper management needs to be dragged out of their office and replaced with new executives. :) Or should I say, they need to be re-accommodated. :)
As exemplified by United’s press release and accompanying reaction.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-11/united-airlines-tumbles-as-social-media-storm-spreads-worldwide
Interestingly, the article notes that Jet Blue and Virgin don’t do this. I expect other airlines to soon follow suit.
This is a column from a guy I know through my EMBA program:
http://thegate.boardingarea.com/plenty-of-blame-to-go-around-with-the-passenger-dragged-off-a-united-airlines-airplane/
Money Quote:
Exactly.
From what I can tell, the whole thing got crazy because of the guy with the laptop who basically threatened the passengers. Then it went from bad to worse.
Bottom line: On the multiple-choice test of life, dragging this man off the plane was not even on the list of possible answers.
United can afford to be arrogant and unapologetic right now because for six months, their income is pretty much assured. People make travel plans and pay for their tickets a long time in advance. But six months and then a year from now, they will be seeing a financial hit to their income. As well they should.
Jimmy Kimmel’s hilarious take on this story.
Good that can come from this: Airlines improve their policies to minimize overbooking and offer better compensation to displaced passengers when it occurs. They can also provide better training for how to handle difficult passengers. (this guy apparently had anger issues, along with a number of interesting legal issues – check it out)
Bad that can come from this: People realize they can get around the rules or the ticket “contract” by throwing fits and daring the airlines to force them to do things. We’ll all be treated to circuses in this event.
Likely longer term outcome: prices will increase to allow for less overbooking / higher payoffs when it happens. Will all the currently outraged people be satisfied that they’re less likely to be bumped when the prices increase? Maybe. Maybe not.
Trade offs.
I find this response incomprehensible. Why did someone “need” to come off the plane? Because United insisted for business reasons, brought about by their own errors and poor planning. There was no law forcing the company to act this way, to penalize peaceful paying customers, let alone use violence to do so. The situation was United’s fault in the first place, and there were other options to resolve it.
1: United had a business reason to want its people on that plane.
2: The Passenger in question had a business reason to not want to give up his seat.
3: The FAA gives United the right to involuntarily bump passengers.
4: The United Crew members not being on board meant an entire planeload of people would miss their flight.
5: The passenger in question not being on board meant one person would miss their flight.
Sucks to be him. Life is hard. Be a man and deal with it.
Try 600 million….
I understand what you’re saying, and it’s probably what I would have done.
However, there were two “men” involved: United Airlines was one “man,” and the expelled passenger was the other man. To my eye, United had as big a temper tantrum as the passenger. Why didn’t the airline just deal with the unfairness of life?
You may be technically and legally correct – but I doubt that will be the approach taken by the attorneys who are almost certainly being lined up to fight this fight. This is a PR disaster, not a legal argument. The root of the problem was United Airlines’ incompetent customer service. My bet is that they are gonna pay.
This incident reminds me a bit of the Terral Martin case. Its what happens when you have a bunch of stubborn morons butting heads with each other.
Be a man and meekly comply when a business subjects you to absurd and unfair treatment to make up for their own incompetence, because it was strictly legal after all.Actually I retract that, because I don’t want to engage on the topic of the man’s behavior. I am directing all my criticism toward United’s chain of utter failures.
But the man’s behavior is exactly the issue. There is nothing “absurd” about an involuntary bump from a full plane. The absurdity is thinking that you’re so important that you don’t have to listen to the requests and instructions, however unfair they may seem, that come from the people running the airline. If he had been reasonable, even if incredibly pissed off, when told he had to leave the plane, none of this would have happened.
I worked for an airline (not UA) for a while. They overbook because people don’t show up, and then (depending on what type of fare) get refunds. Since the advent of super-saver fares, there are passengers whose fares don’t even pay for the fuel they use by occupying their seats. The deadheading crew members had to get where they were going or it messes up another flight. BUT:
-In an overbooked situation, you do NOT give boarding passes until the final situation is assessed. You just don’t board them in the first place. You never put yourself in the position of making a seated passenger leave the aircraft, let alone drag him down the aisle.
-You do NOT make it obvious that employees are occupying seats.
The whole thing was so badly handled that UA deserves the mess it’s in today.
Because they were Chicago PD. O’hare airport is part of the city.
The airline “carriage contract” is a joke. Read it some time. Essentially they take your money, then promise nothing in return.
No, the premisre is exactly wrong. United sold the Doc a ticket and seated him. they might have put their dead-heading employees in a car rentrd from Alamo. I think the guy was exactly right to protest as vigorously as he could, i think the other passengers are sissies for not aiding him, I Think the three goons and the supervisor should be disciplined and I think the Doc should file assault, civil rights and any other suits one can dream up. A scheduling error on the Airlines part does not justify assault bythe police. Thats why we have a Constitution, to prevent “unreasonable searches and seizures”.
No. The man did not initiate any violence. The only violence in this situation was perpetrated by the police, because of United’s multiple failures leading up to the situation. You don’t get to initiate violence against someone you’ve invited aboard the aircraft because of your own late realization of your failure to plan properly. Using violence to remove him at that point is not an acceptable option.
Whether it’s strictly legal is irrelevant.
Whether other people decided to comply nonviolently is irrelevant.
Are Jet Blue and Virgin generally more expensive?
Neither of them have this policy in place.
Update: it seems “this policy” may mean bumping customers for employees, not overbooking paid flights. Thanks to Lily for the correction.
My husband just told me that Southwest tweeted out today: “We beat the competition. Not the passengers.” :)
Pay for a seat, get a reservation get a boarding pass with your assigned seat, sit in the seat, while waiting for takeoff find out your seat is being given to a company employee. And bust up a 69 year old guy for good measure (we all understand you think he deserves it).
It’s the definition of absurdity!
And United knows it, otherwise they wouldn’t have come up with “re-accomodation” as a new word.
This type of thing is how the PS4 beat the snot out of the XBOX One this generation.
Unfortunately, by sitting there and not complying with law enforcement, the passenger was in effect forcing cops to physically pick the man up out of his seat and carry/drag him out of the plane.
If you believe law enforcement enjoys this part of their job you are sorely mistaken. The cops could get injured themselves. These situations can lead to lawsuits where at the very least the cop has to get out of his routine, counsel with attorneys, give depositions, and/or actually testify in court.
Just comply with the cops, get off the plane, and then do your going berserk thing on UA management in the comfort of the airline terminal.
My understanding is that they are. I’ve never flown either.
Still waiting for someone to tell me how they would have removed the man from the plane without “violence”. And don’t tell me “I wouldn’t have removed him”. That’s not the question. He was going to be removed, and he wasn’t doing so willingly. How do you accomplish the task?
You don’t seem to realize that the attempt to remove him was United’s choice. You have put it here in the passive voice: “He was going to be removed”. That’s simply begging the question and hiding the responsibility.
Jet Blue is a discount line, but maybe they are the high end of the discount line? Virgin is not discount, but they have great amenities.
JetBlue bumped a total of 4,881 people 2016, 3,176 (64%) of those were involuntary. (Per Air Travel Consumer Report – December 2016). Virgin did better, with only 1,841 bumped and 77 involuntary.
(voluntary means they agreed to take the comp. and get off)
So, lets see, conclusions: Delta is displacing a ton of people – but getting most of them to agree to go – probably $$$$. Southwest is booting a lot of people, and their % involuntary is higher relative to the industry. American too. United bumped 63 thousand, but only 5.6% involuntarily. Virgin is doing great! JetBlue not booting many people, but forcing most of these off.
Do they have those numbers as a percentage of total passengers boarded?