Passenger dragged off overbooked United flight

[YukonPete 586]

You think the passenger is at fault? So the airlines incompetence that contributed to 99.99% of the situation had nothing to do with it? Yeah ok. 

[gizmosellsbunnys 106]

The airline mess up and the lawyers and passengers gonna have nice money settlement.  The CEO should keep mouth shut here not make any public comment. Airline should of upped the offer or made employees wait for next flight. 

[BlueStar 323]

4 hours ago, Captain_Al said:

'Fly the Friendly Skies" is so true for United Airlines, on the ground, not so much...

They will suffer big time for this combined with what happened a few weeks ago. You don't drag off a paying passenger by the arms like we are in 1940 ###### Germany. This was handled poorly on many levels and their system will be revamped because of this PR nightmare.

Out in west Texas we have a saying about this mess - "No matter how right you are, if it turned out wrong, you did it wrong." 

blaustern

[flybius 3]

The Contract of Carriage is also a Contract of Adhesion... Which is a contract between two parties of which the terms are dictated by one party without offering the other party a position of negotiation. These Adhesion contracts exist throughout our economy and are always composed for the benefit of the creator... not the consumer. Because these Adhesion contracts tend to be unfair to the consumer,   Judges can deem them unenforceable if any action in part of the contract can be deemed unconscionable!

It will be interesting to see how conscionable a Judge will find the actions of United in this circumstance... 

[briansommers 74]

15 hours ago, ahsmatt7 said:

Only the pilot who has actually worked in the airline industry in this thread has any clue what he/she is talking about. Every one else is talking out of their butts. It's comments like these that truly show how little flightsim users actually know about the airlines and how they are ran.

To the user who literally suggest an airline should charter a plane to move four employees to where the airline needs them....You sir are unbelievably ignorant of airline ops.

So you are a real world pilot currently working for an airline now?

[Alan_A 1,650]

I'm not an airline pilot or airline employee.  But I am a corporate PR person - including for crisis counseling.  So, a couple of observations...

-- This is a classic case of how not to do it.

-- Doesn't matter what the letter of the law or the letter of the contract is.  Customer perception is all that counts here because people are going to make a decision to fly with you or not based on how they feel they're going to be treated.  Price matters up to a point, and some people will accept discomfort for a lower price (think low-cost carriers).  But being bloodied and dragged off the airplane by police is several steps beyond discomfort.

-- Remember that for most people, flying is stressful and unnatural even under the best of circumstances.  Security requirements make it even more stressful.  So they're looking to the airline to take stress out, not add to it.  People need to feel comforted, not stressed even more.

-- This incident isn't isolated.  Most things that seem exceptional really aren't - they're usually part of a pattern even if they're extreme examples.  Remember that United is the airline that a couple of weeks ago refused to board some pre-teen girls because they were wearing leggings.  There was a technical reason for this (different dress code for employees traveling on passes) but that doesn't matter.  They were refusing to board totally non-threatening people for a reason that seemed to be both trivial and inconsistent.

-- In the case of both legging-gate and re-accommodation-gate, the airline was putting its own needs and systems ahead of the passengers' needs - never a good idea when you're in a customer service business.

-- I can think of a similar incident that I saw myself - pretty small-scale but it comes to mind.  Last summer I was flying from Barcelona to DC on a United flight that had a whole string of boarding problems - job action at the airport, sick passenger, lost its transatlantic slot and needed to refile, things like that.  But one of the incidents had to do with a standby passenger who was boarded accidentally, even though there was no seat for him.  We had an additional delay while he was taken off the plane - we were at a remote stand so this required boarding stairs and a bus.  Several hours later, when we were airborne, it turned out that there were two rows of three seats each that were unoccupied.  They were set aside as a cabin crew rest area and curtained off for a portion of the flight.  One of those seats could have been given to the standby passenger.  Imagine the goodwill you would have created.  The reserved rest-area seating just seemed to me like a small, odd thing, 'til yesterday, when I thought of it again.

-- What I thought of, when I thought of all this, was a company that clearly has its priorities out of whack.  It's basically a system failure.  My guess - based on experience, though I have no inside knowledge of United - is that the company as a whole is clearly very rigid and obsessed with some sort of performance metrics other than passenger satisfaction. There's an obsession with systems and "this is the way it has to be done."  Rest area can't be changed to accommodate a passenger.  Dress code can't be changed for the sake of a 10 year-old girl in leggings.  Standby auction can't run past a certain price point.  Flight crew can't be moved to its station by any alternate means.  

-- Hard to say what causes the rigidity.  Might be a fear culture.  Might be locked into ways of measuring performance.  What's evident is that they're not giving their line employees enough flexibility to solve problems.  Companies that are great at customer service typically give a lot of autonomy to line employees - think, for example, of a staff member at a hotel reservations desk who's allowed, or even encouraged, to give an irate guest a free upgrade, or a dinner voucher, or run the laundry across the street if the guest arrives late and misses the hotel's laundry cutoff.  A smart United gate agent who's encouraged to improvise and knows he or she has the company's backing for whatever the solution is, could have gone off script and solved the problem.

-- The long-term cure for United is to remember that the customer comes first - everything else is secondary.

-- The short-term cure is to do a lot more than they've been doing so far - massive compensation, form an advisory board with customers and customer advocates on it, create a customer ombudsman office, have a safety stand-down for service staff, conduct an open inquiry and publish your findings.

-- Anybody remember the first thing they did in legging-gate?  Somebody on the social media staff tweeted the full text of the formal dress code policy.  No.  No.  No. Not how it's done.  And here we have the CEO talking about "re-accommodation" and standing up for his staff against the passenger.  No.  Sorry.  Wrong.

-- System problem.  Needs culture change.  Like I said.

 

[Jude Bradley 659]

17 hours ago, Chock said:

Frankly, if they can't find a seat for their crew to get somewhere, they should either charter a private plane or drive them.

 

 

 

Exactly what I was thinking this morning, on my way to work.

 

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

It takes intelligence to use discretion but with the dumbing down of American Society this has led to a Zero Tolerance culture filled with people from the lowest common denominator. This is the reason why these things happen, no one can use their intelligence or discretion anymore and we are left with Zero Tolerance which is the licence for the stupid.

Goon squad smashes the face in of a passenger on an overbooked flight....way to go you are now officially stupid.

[odourboy 1,289]

This incident reminded me of the Indian Jones "No Ticket" gag.

 

[Alan_A 1,650]

One more thing - there's some coverage now suggesting that the passenger has a questionable history - drug charges, lost his license and was trying to regain it.  All of which is, to me, completely beside the point.  This is still a PR disaster.  The test for a customer service establishment isn't how it handles nice, calm, reasonable people. It's how it handles nasty, angry, frightened or disturbed people. United escalated things instead of de-escalating them. Of course an unstable person is going to cause the blow-up. But the damage is the damage.

[scottb613 1,188]

Hi Folks,

Latest twist I read in this saga - the Feds mandate that an involuntary bumped passenger must be informed of said bump in writing - providing a list of their rights and recourse...

Regards,

Scott

[Alan_A 1,650]

A good take in The New Yorker, just posted.  You may or may not like some of the political overtones but the bigger point is similar to mine - this is a symptom of a big, systemic problem.  Not sure if this is behind a paywall or not - if you need to track it down independently, the article is titled "United's Unfriendly Skies."  It's by Amy Davidson, posted today.

 

[Jude Bradley 659]

wow,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_3411

Cost them more than the price of a ticket!

"Subsequent to the incident, there was much negative publicity for United Airlines and their share price dropped by 4% — a loss of US$800 million to the company's market capitalization."

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

1 minute ago, Jude Bradley said:

"Subsequent to the incident, there was much negative publicity for United Airlines and their share price dropped by 4% — a loss of US$800 million to the company's market capitalization."

Good, hopefully a wake up call

[KevinAu 441]

27 minutes ago, Alan_A said:

 

-- What I thought of, when I thought of all this, was a company that clearly has its priorities out of whack.  It's basically a system failure.  My guess - based on experience, though I have no inside knowledge of United - is that the company as a whole is clearly very rigid and obsessed with some sort of performance metrics other than passenger satisfaction. There's an obsession with systems and "this is the way it has to be done."  Rest area can't be changed to accommodate a passenger.  Dress code can't be changed for the sake of a 10 year-old girl in leggings.  Standby auction can't run past a certain price point.  Flight crew can't be moved to its station by any alternate means.  

-- Hard to say what causes the rigidity.  Might be a fear culture.  Might be locked into ways of measuring performance.  What's evident is that they're not giving their line employees enough flexibility to solve problems.  Companies that are great at customer service typically give a lot of autonomy to line employees - think, for example, of a staff member at a hotel reservations desk who's allowed, or even encouraged, to give an irate guest a free upgrade, or a dinner voucher, or run the laundry across the street if the guest arrives late and misses the hotel's laundry cutoff.  A smart United gate agent who's encouraged to improvise and knows he or she has the company's backing for whatever the solution is, could have gone off script and solved the problem.

 

Everything you wrote was on the mark, but the part I quote above completely nails it in the head about how it is like to work there and pretty much any airline.  It is all about metrics. D-0, D-14, CCF, rasm, casm, etc, etc. Statistics that are utterly meaningless to the customers, but obsessed over by management as if they are the sole purpose of the airline's existence.