Should this even be characterized as a problem caused by overbooking? My understanding is that UA at the last minute decided it needed to put four employees on the plane. In order to do so, they decided to kick four confirmed passengers off the flight. That doesn’t sound like overbooking to me.
UA basically took an internal logistical problem and turned it into a passenger problem.
And then a public relations problem.
Sometimes it is more important that the crew get there to operate another flight. Things happen. A crew goes illegal for duty day, winds, equipment issues. It happens because things are fluid, and you can’t control the weather. Some airlines are better at putting slack into their schedules than others, but it’s not like there is a crew base in every city to pull crew from. It gets complicated if there is an issue out in the field, and priority is put on getting another crew there in time to operate a flight. Inconvenience a few passengers or an entire airplane full? And more flights down line.
Airline operators do not have God like powers. They cannot foresee what will happen every time. And if they were to try to cover every single possibility, you would not like your ticket prices.
They are not collecting double for every empty seat. As was explained earlier, many of those seats are refundable tickets. That means they get nothing for them unless they are full.
Prices for these “full fare” tickets are greatly inflated. Full fare students (er, passengers) pay through the nose.
Bus, you can see that nickeled and dimed flying public is totally fed up at this point and your attempts to defend United do not fly.
Agree, this is not overbooking. This is screwing up.
“Should this even be characterized as a problem caused by overbooking? My understanding is that UA at the last minute decided it needed to put four employees on the plane. In order to do so, they decided to kick four confirmed passengers off the flight. That doesn’t sound like overbooking to me.”
Exactly. The flight wasn’t overbooked.
It has nothing to do with what’s important. If it’s that important, wouldn’t you pay what it takes? The seat they sold is customer’s to give up whatever the law says. Can I sell you my house and change my mind for a very important reason? From what I read, nobody took the $800 offered. All four were removed involuntarily, one protested. Good for him! Customers probably got smart and waited for them to up the price of de-boarding possibly. I am joining the boycott of United. I had a most pleasant experience flying to the other coast a couple of weeks ago. It’s the only other airline flying nonstop except American. I was going to fly United again for my next trip in a few weeks. I hadn’t flown United since they merged with Continental.
The video that I have seen does not show the blood that is apparent in the still photo that I have also seen. It looked to me as though the man was bleeding from the nose and the mouth, as well as from the forehead. That does not seem like a scalp wound.
I think this is reprehensible. It is obvious that the compensation for denied boarding needed to be increased until someone took it.
I was once flying overseas (not United) on a flight that was overbooked. I was a chaperone on a high school orchestra trip, and was responsible for three students plus QMP, all sophomores. The other three students and I had been given seat assignments, but QMP had not been issued a boarding pass, for some reason. I was not actually sure what to do in that situation. The other sophomores were going. We did not have surplus chaperones. The airport was close to 2 hours from home. Fortunately, the airlines upped the ante until enough passengers had agreed to be bumped, to the next day in this case. It was not the last flight of the day; it was the only flight of the day between the cities in question.
I think the police are in a tough spot. They have a passenger who refuses to leave the aircraft. What were the police supposed to do? Just walk away when the guy said no? Sure you can talk about it, but what happens when he just refuses to leave? I think the only option for the police is to do what they did. These men in blue have to deal with these types of people all the time. He obviously did not want to go nicely so they were forced to move him instead. He made the decision to do it the hard way. Is it the police’s fault the guy did not comply? You resist arrest and you will be treated with due force. He played that card and it resulted in force being used. The police used a lot of restraint. they did not taser him, club him, etc. The merely took hold of him and removed him. The guy did not even have the decency to walk out. He wanted to make a spectacle and be dragged away. You see this all the time with peaceful protesters. they refused to walk to the paddy wagon and the police need to drag them or carry them. I am sorry, there are only two ways to move someone. they either come voluntarily or non-voluntarily.
Even if this case wasn’t overbooking on this particular flight, it sounds like it is common practice when they do overbook – but maybe they do the random drawing while you are in the gate area instead of onboard usually.
Bottom line – the airline should keep upping the compensation until someone takes it when they oversold their seats, or if the airline thinks they have a higher priority use of the seat than the fact that they sold a seat to a customer. At some point, someone will take the compensation
$800 wouldn’t be enough to get me to skip the last flight of the night, honestly. But under some circumstances, $1500 might be, for example.
It occurs to me that there was probably incomplete communication between the airlines and the security personnel. Were the security personnel told, “We had a full plane, then we discovered that we needed four seats for another crew to get on this flight, then we offered compensation for volunteers to give up their seats, but we only got three takers, so then we had to go to involuntary denial of service, and this passenger we selected would not leave, because he had to see patients the next day”? I rather doubt it.
It seems most likely to me that the security personnel were told, “We told this passenger to deboard and he would not do it.” I don’t excuse the behavior of the security personnel, but if they were given incomplete information, it would explain why they had three or four men, and why they apparently viewed the man as a security risk.
We also don’t know what the passenger actually made of the situation. He apparently gave a reasonable explanation of why they needed to choose someone else. They did not accept it. We don’t know his background experiences, to see how he would have interpreted this, or whether he might have had some reason to be fearful about being removed from the flight.
Also, saying that the identification of the passenger(s) to be involuntarily denied boarding was “random,” appears to be inaccurate. At best, it seems to be random within a fare category.
The worst “bump” I’ve experienced personally was on a flight from London to South Africa. I had called the day before to check in. My parents didn’t. My dad flies constantly and is not in the habit of checking in.
When we got to the airport, they informed us that my parents would be bumped. Even though we had reserved seats, they had had to substitute a smaller plane for the flight! Quite a few people had to be bumped. My parents lost a day of a four-day safari. Of course, my husband and I said we wanted to be bumped instead, but my dad insisted we go, since it was DH’s first trip to the country.
My dad tried to get compensation for the cost of one day of the safari without luck. It was a very frustrating experience. Now I know to always check in the day before!
I recently took $800 in compensation for volunteering to take a flight that left 4 hours later. I figured $200 an hour was a pretty fair deal! The airline (Delta) didn’t try the auction game by starting low. They started at $800. And they offered a choice. I could either wait in the quiet comfortable airport I was flying from or they would pay for a cab to take me to a bigger airport 100 miles away for an earlier connection, still with the $800. I chose to stay where I was. I don’t like cabs.
Usually people jump up to volunteer to get the money. If it’s the last flight of the day and passengers are looking at a 24 hour delay, then they’d have to up the ante considerably more than they did.
At 9:44 am Eastern time today, United Airlines was down 3.09%. A complication in seeing the effect on stock prices is that there is undoubtedly computerized trading going on, and the stock may have dropped to a “buy” level for some of the programs. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the longer term.
Thanks, MaineLonghorn, that is useful information, #191.
No one left voluntarily.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/business/united-flight-passenger-dragged.html?_r=0
The security officer is put on leave.
How could 2 (3?) big policemen dragged the man out but he was able to run back and forth in the aisle and repeatedly said “I have to go home” ? Did the policemen release him because they had some second thought?
What was the mental state of the 68 year old man? It seemed he was in fear in the second video.
10:23 am Eastern time, United Airlines down 4.11%.
Well, here we go …straight from the police brutality playbook.
I’m not going to post the story that’s circulating.
Deleted comment. But I bet some of y’all can guess what I’m thinking …