“Although I really think they should have offered more money. At some point the pilot should have announced over the PA system, “Hey folks, $800 is our best and final offer and we can’t leave until we get one more person off the plane so we are just going to sit her until someone volunteers to get off the plane.” I’m sure after they sat there for a few minutes someone would have volunteered.”
Very good point.
Also, yes it is true that passengers are completely at the mercy of the airlines when the captain or a flight attendant invokes the “disruptive passenger” canard. It’s literally a WMD as far as your rights are concerned.
Finally, sad to say that this seems to be the rule regarding United’s attitude, not the exception. When we parents were trying to make our way to Freshman Orientation a few years ago, and United cancelled our connecting flight and lied about the rationale, an argument began. Not a fist-fight, not any finger poking in the chest, no name calling and no yelling. Just a disagreement (in which the regional carrier actually supported the passengers’ argument vs. United). Well, the United staffers a the customer service desk were so annoyed that we had the stones to call them on their error, they called the airport cops. The cops came, asked a question or two, and left. Just think what would have happened had we actually been on board.
One final point. Maybe the airlines should get into the habit of hiring experts such as jury consultants, to help them figure out who is likely to vote with his or her feet and volunteer to give up a seat.
One comment about the leggings incident: even if it was way overblown, it prepared the public’s mind for this new, much worse, PR disaster. It makes people say, “What’s going on at United?” This is why smart companies think about the PR implications of their actions.
During check in, some passengers do not get real boarding passes with seat assignments. They have to get boarding passes at the gate later. Of course, if the flight is overbooked without enough VDB, such passengers are most at risk of being IDB.
Note the trend of airlines (that normally have assigned seats) selling tickets without pre-assigned seats unless you pay extra. This gives the airline a larger pool of passengers to put in the “unassigned seat at check in” pool on the day of the flight. This is useful for the airlines both for IDB purposes and for rearranging seating for families who must sit together for small children or others who need care.
Of course, it is not really random. Frequent flyer elite status, higher fare buckets, buying a seat assignment when buying a ticket, time of check in, etc. can all affect your risk of IDB. The occasional flyer, who is least likely to know how stuff like this works, and is least likely to have contingency plans, is more likely to be IDB.
The compensation they will offer for VDB will get higher, obviating the need for IDB, or they will figure out how to book their planes so it doesn’t happen. Win/win either way.
Airlines are hugely profitable. They can no longer claim that every possible seat needs to be filled in order for them to survive. Overbooking is no longer a necessity, and should not be tolerated by consumers.
Airlines already charge change fees for most tickets that often exceed the cost of the flight. So they are already getting the revenue when passengers don’t show up. If they think they are losing too much money when passengers like @busdriver11 book two fully refundable tickets for the same time so they can pick one and get their money back for the other, well, disallow this or start charging these passengers change or cancellation fees. Or eat the loss. Or come up with something else.
@notrichenough : “As I understand it the boarding process doesn’t end when you sit in your seat. It ends when the door of the plane closes and the plane pushes back.”
That may be YOUR understanding but there are good legal reasons why a court may say that is WRONG. Post 155 covers the legal issue well. “Throughout the contract [ of carriage], denial of boarding is referred to separately from removal from the aircraft (see, e.g., Rule 16B(2)); they are two separate terms and the former does not include the latter. Therefore, the provisions of Rule 25 regarding denial of boarding in cases of overbooking are irrelevant”
Anyone who knows anything about how courts interpret contracts know that a United is in legal peril here. They very well may have had NO right to ask the passenger to leave.
partyof5: in this case the officer involved has been put on leave. His organization released a statement that they do not condone his actions, and that this is not their policy. This is airport security, not regular police. The Chicago police did release a seemingly erroneous statement about the events, when called by the press. I am not sure how they were involved.
The passenger was a doctor but was only allowed to practice on a limited basis due to some drug conviction issues in the last couple of years. I doubt he needed to get to a dying patient.
There’s an interesting piece on CNN Business about this, mentioning that it’s a particular PR disaster in China, which is a big growth market for United.
United should have checked with partner/codeshare airlines (or any for that matter) to see if they could have accommodated transporting the crew and get them there within the time frame they needed.
The problem the police face is people will say all kinds of crazy things to get away with stuff. This guy said he was a doctor needed in surgery. Could be true could be a lie. I hope we find out from the hospital if a surgery was in fact scheduled.
Can you imagine the “you’ve been punked” video this would have made if the cop gave in and walked away. The cop would have been the laughing stock of the internet. The police removed this uncooperative guy from the flight. It looks ugly but this is what the police have to deal with all the time. God bless them for what they do.
While the doctor may have his own personal issues, wasn’t there a red line that was crossed during all of this where the behavior by United and the security personnel becomes the only thing that matters? I think United is digging the hole deeper by trying to victim shame him.
“The passenger was a doctor but was only allowed to practice on a limited basis due to some drug conviction issues in the last couple of years. I doubt he needed to get to a dying patient.”
Whether he is a doctor, a doctor with limited practice due to a drug conviction, or neither, is completely immaterial.
I can’t believe people are trying to give United a pass because of the background of the passenger.
I think the whole idea of airlines overbooking on purpose needs to go. Can you imagine if a popular restaurant overbooked for a Saturday night, and then everyone who booked actually showed up, and the manager decided that a certain table of diners needed to leave after they had just ordered their apps? Would those diners get dragged out of the restaurant for refusing?
While I think that United handled this horribly, the post by @notrichenough just had a number of misunderstandings and errors that need to be corrected:
You realize that this means your ticket price will go up, right? There is no free lunch.
On a long term basis, airlines are one of the least profitable businesses around. They face very high fixed costs, an extremely stringent regulatory environment (which has made flying very safe), and an immediately perishable commodity (the value of an unsold seat is zero).
I have some upcoming international flights where I am flying about 20K miles for $1300. Only about $600 of that goes to the airline, so they are flying me for $0.03 per mile. That is dirt cheap, and it is a wonder that these planes can fly at all.
The incident that made me swear off flying on United happened some years ago when I was flying from the west coast to Burlington, VT. I flew to one of the United hubs cities and was scheduled catch a connecting flight on a smaller jet to Burlington.
I happened to be standing right in front of the United desk when my flight to VT was abruptly cancelled. But the shocking thing was that about 6 or 7 other flights were cancelled then too, over the space of about 30 seconds. “ Cancelled, Cancelled, Cancelled…” popped up on the board next to the flights, one after the other. We were instructed to check with the desk about rebooking to a later flight.
When I got to the desk and asked why my flight was cancelled they said “mechanical problems,” but not to worry, they said there was a later flight that would still get me there today. It seemed a little fishy to me to me so I hung around the desk and listened to them rebooking some of the other cancelled passengers. They were all being told “mechanical problems” no matter which flight they were on.
It soon became obvious what was really going on. All the cancelled flights were to smaller cities and all had a later flight that the passengers could be rebooked to. Thus “mechanical problems” magically popped up at 3:00 PM in a half dozen or more different planes. The airline was cancelling the earlier flights and basically combining two half-full flights to create one full flight.
The trouble didn’t end when we finally got Burlington late that night. Burlington is a smaller airport and not all its facilities operate around the clock. Many of the rebooked passengers, including me, had rental car reservation, but by time we finally got there all the car rental desks were closed and dark. No way to get the cars we had reserved. We all had to pay for expensive taxis to get to our various destinations for the night.
In general, I don’t mind a company seeking to run its airline in a cost-efficient manner, but it should not have been based on a cynical strategy of deliberately deceiving and inconveniencing their customers in transit. And the worst of all were the blatant lies about the mechanical problems. So that’s why I have never flown United again, not because they canceled my flight and ruined the first part of my trip but because they LIED to me.
Given the recent events, I guess I should feel fortunate that I was merely lied to and not assaulted. But either way it sure seems to me like a poor way to run a business.
My worst flying experience ever was with United. It was so bad it was actually comical… a group of us passengers were chasing a “customer help representative” around O’Hare. When they saw us coming they actually shut the door and put a closed sign on the door, even though it was supposed to be open 24 hours.
Emilybee- You are quite the master of distorting what people post! No one is “giving United a pass”. However, social media elevated this passenger’s status to that of a brain surgeon rushing to save a life. In fact, he had limited practice privileges at a clinic. That’s not an excuse for security personnel manhandling a passenger, but let’s get the facts right!
I’m glad the post giving the impression that airlines are hugely profitable was addressed above. That is simply incorrect.
How do we know the airline didn’t try to find other arrangements to get the crew to Louisville? Maybe this was the last resort? I don’t know the answer, but we seem to be really good at second guessing everything.
The guy was an idiot for trying to stay on the flight when he was told to leave it. The security personnel were over the top and an investigation is being conducted. It’s a PR nightmare for United. I work for a company with over 1600 locations, and I could see a rogue employee doing something completely against our strong ethics and policies and causing this sort of disaster. Regional airlines don’t have the strongest employee base, either.