"Quick And GENEROUS..."
Community
Oh you bet!
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/04/13/united-passenger-launches-legal-action-over-forceful-removal/22038291/
"On Wednesday, United said it would compensate all (ALL!!!!!!) passengers on board the flight the cost of their tickets."
And all this because they chintzed on how much they would offer people to give up their seats to a few hundred dollars!!!
Again.............STUPID, STUPID, STUPID!!!!!
If they kept raising the incentive to give up a seat, that could start a trend where people know they can hold out and get a free ticket and $1500 (or whatever). Still cheaper than this but long term sets an expensive precedent. They should have sorted this out before people were seated. Canceling the flight the employees were trying to get to would have been expensive, but nothing like the PR mess they have now. Flights get cancelled every day. It stinks and people are unhappy but its forgotten about shortly. Obviously its easy to see in hindsight but even in real time someone should have hit the brakes before physically dragging a passenger off the plane due to overbooking.
People make a living doing that anyway. It's real simple, if the airlines don't want to set a trend, then end the trend of overbooking. Here is the problem with the airlines "compensating" people for their trouble. Many people faced with this situation are spending lots of money using the travel for vacation. they are spending money they will never get returned anyway. A voucher for a fixed dollar amount, $500, $800, $1000...whatever it may be that can only be used by the named person and has to be used within a 12 month period, is not much of an incentive for the hassle of missing part of a vacation that people may have saved for years to take. It seems that you can demand cash for the trouble, but again, if you are going to inconvenience a pre paid customer by bumping them from a flight, there has to be enough of a payoff to make it worth while. How much should be left to the passengers contemplating giving up the seats.
Link: How'd you get that to load? I tried to enter that link but it wouldn't take it and it told me to "post the required format", so I just did it how I did.
If their employees had to get to St. Louis they could have gotten them there several other ways that would have made this whole debacle a non-issue, not to mention saving UAL MILLIONS of dollars.
5 winters ago I drove a limo for a few months. My AVERAGE day was 15+ hours. They only offered people $800 each if they gave up their seats. That's $3200. I would have driven them down there for HALF that and still would have made more than I was making in 2 weeks, AND I'd have had a shorter day!!! Trust me, you could go to the limo staging lot at O'Hare and have a cage match to see which limo driver would win the prize of making that trip!! And it'd make what happened to Dr. Won Ton look like a Barney episode!
Bottom line, this should be a textbook business 101 lesson on how NOT to run customer service.
For what this clown's going to walk away with I just wish that it would've been ME that had the crap beaten out of him! I'm jealous........
This whole story has me furious. Even the lottery they used to pick the man. What happens if a child is picked and is separated from their parent or vice versa. The whole thing stinks from Munoz down.
Here's the potential problem with driving the flight crew to Louisville from O'hare . Presumably the pilots were part of this trip. They only have a certain amount of time on duty allocated before they can't fly. Without looking up the reg which the exact time escapes me now, I seem to recall 7 hours. Because the FAA falls under the DOT, it's likely that the travel to the airport is considered on duty and might very well eat into those 7 hours available. That leaves 3 hours of time left for the pilots, which may not be enough for their scheduled flight.
I just saw it reported that the passenger, ended up with a concussion, broken nose and lost several teeth and needs reconstructive surgery. He has no recollection of returning onto the plane. He is going home by car as he is afraid to fly now. This has the appearance of being an expensive mistake for United. I'm also reading that this action by the airline was actually illegal, that they can't forcibly remove an already seated passenger under these circumstances. The other part of this issue is the flight was not overbooked. They just wanted to seat 4 employees at the last minute that were not previously booked.
They could have put the four employees in a car and driven them there in four hours.
Say your flying down to take a once in a lifetime cruise with your wife. You spend thousands on a cruise and miss departure and they think $800 lousy bucks each is reasonable?? (yes, some of us save up for decades for a once in a lifetime chance at a cruise and only get a 25th anniversary once in our life).
Just keep upping the ante until someone finds it reasonable for their circumstance. If it's too much, then they should consider where the expense of over booking doesn't justify the practice, or at least reduce how much over booking is worth the risk.
STUPID, STUPID, STUPID!!!!!!!!
The whole situation was stupid on United's part. But there are hilarious memes out there from it!!!
