United's new club class.
Posted on 04/10/2017 7:37:53 AM PDT by BulletBobCo
“No, this is wrong,” a woman shouts at security officers in the video.”Oh my God, look at what you did to him!”
A disturbing video was uploaded to Facebook by Audra Bridges Sunday night. It shows a full United flight sitting at a Chicago airport and bound for Louisville. But there was a problem – United had overbooked the flight, they needed four seats for their stand-by crew and no one was volunteering to give up their spot.
That problem led to a violent confrontation as security forced one passenger off the plane, who said he was a doctor and couldn’t take a later flight because he had patients to see at his hospital in the morning.
Bridges, a Louisville resident, told the Courier-Journal that United announced in the terminal Sunday night that the flight was overbooked and offered passengers $400 and a night at a hotel to give up their seat and opt for a flight at 3 p.m. on Monday. No one volunteered, and passengers boarded the flight. United told the full flight that they couldn’t take off without the four seats, then upped the offer to $800 plus a night at a hotel, but still no one volunteered.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
To me calling for a 10X payment for inconveniencing oneself seems drastic.
the only exception I take with your post is the line: “in one small stupid move”.
It’s been building up for Y-E-A-R-S. Pre 9-11 it was already getting bad.
Regulations have only made it worse (as always).
They are so full of themselves now, because they think there are no other options. To some degree they are right, but this....this is going to create changes the entire industry needs. It may take some time, but it will happen.
Exactly what I thought
Amtrak used to go Chicago-Indy-Louisville. It was a ten+ hour overnight trip.
Yeah, but now he'll most likely get $800,000 dollars in the soon-to-be-filed lawsuit (or maybe as much in a quick out of court settlement just to make the story go away), so perhaps he wasn't so dumb for holding out after all...
They stopped at $800. The reality is that they could go back to the old offer 2 free tickets to anywhere in the US. If that wasn’t enough try first class tickets. That one used to get picked a lot.
There is no reason not to go past $800. They decided to deal with highly inconvenienced passengers rather than up the money. If someone was not going to be highly inconvenienced they would have taken the deal. So instead, the airline made the call. They had first priority. And the passenger decided he had a strategy to make them pay for his inconvenience. Consider it “Occupy United”.
then they need to exempt certain emergency people from getting bumped.
If overbooking were prohibited by law, then the playing field would be level and the airlines would marginally increase ticket prices to cover the few empty seats.
Had I been on the plane, I might have delayed my arrival at work if this started happening. But once the guy decided to act like a major jerk, I’d have turned back to my book. I doubt people will skip United because of this - most flights I fly on are full. If people still fly even with TSA, then this will mean little.
Some people travel for fun and even for business some trios are time critical where others are not.
I have been on flights where it was critical that I make my destination on schedule.
Perhaps this passenger was too.
You obviously work for some one else so a missed flight is just another part of the job.
If this dude was a doctor he may have had good reason to be somewhere.
At least if those at risk of bumping were informed at the time of purchase then they would know what they were getting into. The complication, though, is that others could cancel their reservations in the meantime which could change the equation.
***********
Can they sell Non-bumpable tickets at a premium, or do the federal regulations not allow that?
Example: They add $20-$50-$70 or something on to the ticket that makes it non-bumpable. Maybe they only sell a certain percentage of these on a given plane so they still continue to overbook and have some seats available to be bumped so planes are full at wheels up. But customers who have a schedule that can’t be delayed by a later flight can protect themselves from that kind of disruption.
“denied boarding” and “oversold” is the key language there.
He had been allowed to board so “denied boarding” is inoperative. Further the flight had not been “oversold”. The seats were needed for non-ticketed airline employees.
UA loses.
“in one small stupid move”
Said about Rosa Parks too.
If $800 didn’t work, ten grand would have been a cheap price to avoid all this negative publicity. With ten grand at stake, the passengers would have been crawling over each other to get out of the plane. An offer like that would be amazing positive publicity for the airline, making more people want to fly it.
That said, the law says that a passengers must obey the crew.
Now they just call the cops?
Post 9/11...it’s much cheaper to just call a customer service issue a “security incident”.
You get more flies with honey....
Another comment on the thread indicated that the doctor told the passenger next to him he just wanted to get home.
United's new club class.
That’s fine. If they lose business then that’s better for the competition. I conceded that it was bad PR, but on the other hand people need to read their contract when they buy a ticket.
And it’s not necessarily about being “right”. They have to follow some regulations on safety and this may have been (I’m not saying it is but may have been) an issue of safety on that flight or some other that the extra crew was trying to get to. Airlines had a lot of things to balance.
Shoot! so would I! $800 plus a free stay at a hotel.....HERE I AM.
“They gave me a $10 voucher for lunch”
What does that get you in an airport today, a side of pickles and a package of mayonnaise?
Noooo. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Macho Grande. Those wounds run... pretty deep.
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