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Overbooking, Flightcrew over paying passengers, the United incident


Ser Scot A Ellison

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48 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

They offered this guy $800.

I doubt very much that he paid anywhere near that for his ticket.

Geez he must have had powerful reasons not to get off. I'd have taken that in a heartbeat with the only exception being the imminent death of a loved one. Converting to NZD that's about 3x what I earn in a day. Kind of a no brainer really.

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Well to me the lesson is that just because a practice is legal doesnt make it wise. United made the assumption that it was okay to inconveniance its customers because it wouldve been difficult to get their employees to another state in time. That assumption doesnt seem wise right now. Even IF no laws were broken by the carrier, they should be rethinking their practices at this point. If they cant learn from this past few weeks (going back to the "legg-ins wear" controversy) then they will continue to pay dearly in the market place. 

Inconveniencing hundreds of customers and pissing off thousands more is poor business practice, consumers are going to expect solutions from United in the future, not excuses about how their jobs are hard or its difficult to get their employees to a certain destination on time. If they stay in defiant mode it will just be digging the hole deeper.

To me thats what impression ive had of Uniteds initial responses from these controversies, defiant, excuses and a bit of victim blaming to boot. Not looking wise to me at all.

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10 hours ago, Swordfish said:

it's reasonable based on what we do know that there would be an increase in ticket prices if overbooking was stopped. 

Are you disputing that?

Yes.

To be exact, and I have said this pretty clearly before, I'm saying it seems naive to simply accept that assertion (made by the airlines themselves) without questioning it. The airlines, after all, don't want you to think about whether the costs of a reduction in or the elimination of overbooking would result in costs they could absorb rather than passing on to customers.

In any case, this isn't the main issue, as has been noted - the flight appears to have been 'overbooked' only inasmuch as there weren't spare seats for transporting employees. Seems to me that if an airline is going to rely on there being such seats, if that's so critical to operations as to justify forcibly removing a passenger, then they should probably set aside seats for that purpose when booking the plane.

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I keep thinking about how this would be different if it were, say, a bus. I was on a bus once that caught fire (a little). It pulled over, we all got off, and then stood about by the side of the highway for 15 minutes until a new bus came.

For all we know, the situation that led to needing to get those crew members on that plane was equally unlikely and catastrophic. The issue seems to be that the corporation has externalized its catastrophes and incompetences, and even its supply-demand risks, onto customers. (I mean, this is whats been happening between employers and employees for a while, but I think this reveals the introduction of the customers into it as well.) Having to boot a customer off a plane should be an act-of-god, bus-on-fire type situation. Profuse apologies and a willingness by the corporation to soak up whatever the necessary expense is - this is the nature of an acceptable contract between a provider and a customer in a capitalist system, surely. They get to make a profit, as a business, because they're carrying risk. If they shift all the risk onto me, the customer, and I am forced to pay in cost or quality of service (or, in the case of airline industry, apparently both) for their failures and strokes of bad luck - what value does the capitalist system here provide?

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8 hours ago, karaddin said:

Iskaral - I accept all US airlines do it, but that simply doesn't happen here. Maybe Australia is some unique snowflake but I'm not familiar with it happening in Europe either.

Overbooking most certainly does happen here (Australia) I was bumped from a connecting flight in Melbourne just last week. Luckily there was another flight only an hour later. 

I believe Europe has tighter laws on it though.

 

News source to back up assertion: http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-11/flight-overbooked-what-rights-australia-united-airlines/8433170

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Never encountered this either, including on the rock-bottom Euro no frills airlines that drop you off in the middle of a field half way to Gdansk and call it 'Warsaw' - always assumed it was just a US thing.

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In relation to this story, all three Norwegian airlines confirmed that it does happen here as well. Which was something we already knew.

To be fair, the smallest one claims it almost never happens (which I think is correct), and another claimed it only happens as a mistake - but I don't really buy spin from that carrier. Will have to see it confirmed from another source before I believe it.

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4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Geez he must have had powerful reasons not to get off. I'd have taken that in a heartbeat with the only exception being the imminent death of a loved one. Converting to NZD that's about 3x what I earn in a day. Kind of a no brainer really.

Not a no brainer.

$800 + a hotel stay is not optimal for many people, especially after they have boarded the plane and are ready to be home.  In this case, according to what I've read, this doctor had appointments to keep on Monday.  That's worth a lot more than $800.

The same with business travelers who have meetings, or vacationers who have chewed up their time off and need to be at work the next day or else face repercussions from employers.

Also, think that this person's luggage has already been checked and is in the belly of the plane. They have to delay to find it, or else separate the traveler from their belongings for a night.  That's not worth $800 in stress to most people.

Once a person is seated on the plane, it's like you're in the home stretch of travel.  Any bumps should take place BEFORE anyone is boarded.

If anything, this incident has put a spotlight on the tiny print that most of us don't even bother with reading. We sign our rights over, expecting a service, but not realizing that the company has a ton of legal power to do whatever it wants in accordance with that fine print.  United and the aviation police screwed up in their execution of that fine print. They need to get better and the public needs to keep them accountable by demanding better.

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4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Geez he must have had powerful reasons not to get off. I'd have taken that in a heartbeat with the only exception being the imminent death of a loved one. Converting to NZD that's about 3x what I earn in a day. Kind of a no brainer really.

There would be dozens of reasons 100+ people declined to accept money in exchange for delaying their travel on a Monday by about 24 hours.  You've noted being motivated for even token amounts of money, but this isn't true for everyone.  $800 might be more money than a person makes in a month, but it's nothing if missing a day of work means getting fired.   Slate has an article about why payments for being bumped are pretty shit, though they focus more on traveling for work rather than things like family needs.  

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ignoring the stupidity of the whole thing and the fact the airline massively fucked up the process, the fact that the airline has the right to do this, and that the dudes wife had already gotten off, he comes across as at least partly, if not equally responsible for being forcibly removed.  

I can't see anyway that removing someone forcibly from an airplane doesn't result in injury, the space alone is critical when moving someone against their will. 

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1 minute ago, BigFatCoward said:

ignoring the stupidity of the whole thing and the fact the airline massively fucked up the process, the fact that the airline has the right to do this, and that the dudes wife had already gotten off, he comes across as at least partly, if not equally responsible for being forcibly removed.  

I can't see anyway that removing someone forcibly from an airplane doesn't result in injury, the space alone is critical when moving someone against their will. 

Not just injury to the person being forcibly removed. There are 100+ other passengers who could be inadvertently injured, let alone traumatized at viewing such a physical confrontation on an airplane.

United is lucky in that aspect that only ONE person was harmed physically. Imagine if someone else got kicked or knocked out in the process. There would be chaos.

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5 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

   Slate has an article about why payments for being bumped are pretty shit, though they focus more on traveling for work rather than things like family needs.  

That's fascinating and so unintuitive to me - I've long known I'm way out on the bellcurve in terms of travel-tolerance - I mean, I've hitchhiked thousands of kilometers at least partially to save 50$ - but I didn't think it was to that extent.

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6 hours ago, Swordfish said:

They offered this guy $800.

I doubt very much that he paid anywhere near that for his ticket.

Well, United's value just depreciated $1.5 billion because of this incident. I don't believe getting company employees to where they needed to be would have cost that much either (even renting out a helicopter).

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9 minutes ago, 3CityApache said:

Yeah, well, the power of social media. If it were in before Internet era, no one would ever hear about it but the few other passengers.

The paradigm has shifted. Companies who don't adjust accordingly are in for a bumpy ride.

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30 minutes ago, Datepalm said:

That's fascinating and so unintuitive to me - I've long known I'm way out on the bellcurve in terms of travel-tolerance - I mean, I've hitchhiked thousands of kilometers at least partially to save 50$ - but I didn't think it was to that extent.

Just 18 months ago I would have done something similar because I had all the time in the world to get from A to B.  Today definitely not.  There are new variables that make taking anything other than the most direct route nearly impossible.  Unless it's a systemwide outage for weather or something, I'm not taking a voluntary bump or saving some change.

14 minutes ago, 3CityApache said:

Yeah, well, the power of social media. If it were in before Internet era, no one would ever hear about it but the few other passengers.

Before social media, companies could get away with all of this because if that man went to the news and said he was assaulted for not volunteering to be bumped, they'd just shrug it off and say he was probably lying because he's not a perfectly upstanding citizen.  

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20 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Just 18 months ago I would have done something similar because I had all the time in the world to get from A to B.  Today definitely not.  There are new variables that make taking anything other than the most direct route nearly impossible.  Unless it's a systemwide outage for weather or something, I'm not taking a voluntary bump or saving some change

I'm in the middle of figuring out my first ever time-constrained flight at the moment, actually, and I'm having a ridiculously hard time booking a straightforward return ticket to Madrid that gets me there by the time I need to be there while not leaving before the time I need to be here. I keep distracting myself with things like flying to Bucharest and taking a train to Budapest and then...yeah, no. I mean, I certainly get the point, but its unintuitive.

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