I agree completely. As others have said, usually once you are on the plane, you are good to go. They will make the offers at the gate for the free flight credits before boarding to accommodate the over-booking. Their first mistake was waiting to get on the plane. The second was forcing people against their will. The third is the treatment by the security team, and above all displacing paying customers in this manner for employees. The fact that they had either pilots or crew that needed to be somewhere is not the passengers problem. Should they have gotten volunteers, that would be one thing. I might take $1000 in free vouchers to fly home the next morning. To create this for their own business logistics is bad. They needed to either get them on another plane or find replacements from elsewhere. Should have have booked 4 people onto the plane who were paying customers, then they have a conundrum of who gets displaced among the customers. That’s not good, but this is horrific all-around.
Agree. Total FUBAR by UAL.