Can’t there be fault with both sides here?
United shouldn’t have asked Dao to leave after he had been seated, at least for the reason it did. They also should have upped their monetary incentive.
On the other hand, do we really want passengers deciding for themselves when to obey orders from airport police to leave — and to violently resist whenever they feel like it? There will be situations when a seated passenger should leave to protect the wellbeing of a lot of people.
Yeah, but if United had followed your first comment, the second would have not been necessary. Somehow, “customer service” means something a whole lot different to the airlines than it does to every other business. The have always put on this layer of bull$hit about “the friendly skies,” but the way they’ve always treated their paying customers is completely different. The lone exception in my air travel experiences has been Southwest. They are a gem amongst a bunch of lumps of coal.