Link here.
I’m sure there will be a big lawsuit coming. It’s baffling why a company would want to do this, with the certainty of cell-phone recordings, rather than just continue to up the offer for compensation until they get enough passengers to agree to be on the next flight. I seriously doubt that United Airlines would lose more money by offering 2, 3, or even 5 thousand dollars per delayed passenger than it will with an upcoming lawsuit and PR hit.
What is baffling to me about this, and the whole process of overbooking/offering- compensation-to-take-a-later-flight, is why passenger A who wants a seat has more priority than passenger B who is already on the flight? I mean, really, the seat is filled, who are these super special people that get to bump someone off a flight? That is the great mystery to me. I say this as someone who flies across country at least twice a week and has for over 20 years.
From what I’ve read, they were crew members who were traveling on airline business, meaning they were needed for a flight going out of Louisville later. They have a very high priority, because their failure to get to the destination could stop a whole planeload of other people from flying. (This is not the same as employees traveling for personal reasons on an employee pass. They have the absolute lowest priority.)
AFAIK, once it gets to the involuntary denial stage (which I think is supposed to happen before boarding, not on the plane), they’re supposed pull the passengers from the lowest fare class and work their way up.
From what I read on reddit, there were 4 United crew members who were on stand-by to fly to Frankfurt, KY for work. I’m sure a domino effect would ensue where then other planes wouldn’t be able to take off due to being understaffed.
My husband and I pretty much exclusively fly Delta (or its codeshare partners) and have offered up our seats for money. In December, my husband, a friend, and I were all flying to Frankfurt via Amsterdam. That flight was overbooked and we offered to take a later flight via LHR. No big deal especially as we try to factor in flight delays into our travel plans. He’s offered to get bumped about every 5th flight it seems. Sometimes he gets it, other times he bid too high. We were both under the impression that the airline had to keep upping the compensation offer until someone took it though.
That said… It sucks that this guy got bumped off of the flight. But he should have left after the first air marshal advised him to leave. Actually, he should have left when the flight crew told him to deplane. Federal law requires passengers to follow their instructions, whether you like it or not.
United was at fault when they overbooked the flight. The guy was also at fault for not leaving when instructed to. The air marshals might have handled it better, but it didn’t seem like after having three people of them there and the flight crew telling him to leave that they had much of a choice. Ultimately, the doctor had a choice and chose poorly.
Why not just keep upping the $ offer? Eventually someone will say yes, and paying a few grand for a big airline is nothing compared to the PR hit and lawsuits from physically dragging a passenger off the plane.
As I understand it people aren’t properly incentivised to volunteer anyway, in that the offered remuneration is in voucher form with lots of limits as to how they can be redeemed. If they offered actual cash there would probably be actual volunteers
With Delta, we get a voucher that can be redeemed in a number of ways. For the flight we took via LHR instead of AMS (which only got us in an hour later), we got $200 vouchers each. They could be redeemed for a Delta giftcard, Amazon gift card, some other gift cards, or a Visa/Amex credit card with that amount on it.
Seems like this is the perfect kind of problem that the market could and should be able to solve without ever having to use physical force: continue raising the offer until someone says “yes”, and if airlines determine that this is costing them serious income, then they’ll get better at predicting how many passengers they should book. No reason physical force should ever be required.
Well, they shouldn’t have to physically drag someone from the plane no matter what. If it absolutely has to get to the involuntary stage, the person to be denied boarding shouldn’t be allowed, you know, boarding. The airline effed up by bringing this situation onto a cramped aluminum tube with Security Implications.
I’m equally baffled by anyone who refuses to comply with a direct order from a flight crew member, knowing that physical force (and potential fines/imprisonment) is the next step. Until the plane leaves the ground, your seat isn’t guaranteed.
The guy claimed he had to see patients the next day - surely he was prepared for the possibility that the flight would be delayed or cancelled due to weather or mechanical issues, so missing it due to overbooking wasn’t going to be any kind of galactic catastrophe.
There are laws about required compensation, but they don’t require an impromptu auction that goes to infinity. Airlines are typically willing to pay several hundred dollars above/beyond that in order to make everyone happy - a willing overbook victim happily pockets some bonus money, and an unwilling victim then happily gets a seat on this flight - but they’re not willing to pay arbitrarily large sums of money to make that happen.
Seems like upping the ante in cases like these would save a lot more money than they’re likely to lose from a potential lawsuit as well as a PR hit.
I don’t have time to read the article right now so maybe this has been covered, but why did it have to be that one guy? Couldn’t they have just announced that they needed a volunteer who would be compensated to wait for a later flight because they weren’t leaving until someone did?
They did that – they offered $400, then $800, and not enough people took the offer. But IMO they should have kept going up until enough people said yes – they stopped after $800, if I read it right, and randomly selected passengers.
What lawsuit? The air marshals are federal agents, not United employees. They are the ones who used force, and they used only the amount of force needed to remove a passenger who was resisting removal. He was being removed for refusing to comply with a lawful direct order from a flight crew member. It all looks legit to me; I’m not sure what he should be suing for, and I’m not sure what UA should be apologizing for, other than overbooking the guy in the first place (which happens to everyone once in a while).
This. When nobody took the $800 bait, their computer picked overbook victims at random, and this petulant man-child was one of them.
I agree with this, but probably not for the same reasons you do.
Exactly. And of course it’s all over Facebook with people screaming about law suits.
So, you’re a doctor: big fucking deal. Gee if only there was a way to communicate with your patients that their appointments would be cancelled!
Yes, the guy should have gotten off when ordered to. You follow flight crew instructions, that’s the rule. That MUST be the rule - it is the law, it’s common sense, and it’s a matter of safety. No matter how unfair you feel the orders are you follow them. As a wise man once said, “it might be my mission but it’s sure as shit the Chief’s boat.” When you are on a vessel you do what the crew tells you. He could have gotten off, and then raised hell at the customer service desk.
The airline also acted shittily. First of all, the overbooking situation absolutely could have been handled prior to boarding. I am sure their computers can count to a number above the number of seats on that airplane. Secondly, if no one wanted to get off for $800, raise it to $1200. It’s their fault the flight was overbooked and they should pay for it. If airlines are overbooking flights, they 're being paid for flights not taken. (To make it entirely fair there should be federal rules banning overbooking, or else no one airline can do it first.)
It’s hard to tell if the security guys overdid it.
But here’s the kicker t hat everyone seemed to be missing:
“The man was eventually allowed to re-board the plane, which left with a two-hour delay.”
Um… so THEY DIDN’T NEED HIM TO GIVE UP HIS SEAT. They had a seat for him anyway. So the fuckup is, in fact, much greater than originally thought. They went through this idiocy and he ended up back on the plane. Jesus Christ.
I think you made this point about five times now, without much variation. You say that they would save money in the long run by avoiding lawsuits and bad PR, but I say that there are established rules for what passengers expect as far as seating and compensation goes and if those rules are thrown out the window then no one will follow what they have already agreed to when they bought their ticket, and there will be one fucking large back-up on the flightline as negotiations drone on and on and on.
What PR hit?
Nobody will remember this after this evening. If United can sell enough tickets to overbook, they ain’t gonna lose a cent over this.
It’s not like people are gonna stop flying.
Or the other airlines are going to start advertising “Forget the rules you’ve already agreed to-Keep saying no and eventually we’ll give you whatever you want!”