A much better analogy for the situation, if you are wishing to use a barber shop as your setting, would be that you took the appointment, told them no problem. They paid up front, as your policy requires them to do. They showed up on time for their appointment. You greeted them and sat them down in the chair. But, before you can put the blanket over them and get started, your phone rings, and your wife is calling to tell you that you have forgotten dinner reservations with her, for the umpteenth time.
This is where the rest of your scenario plays out what with the calling of the police to handle your lack of planning.
A better way of handling it would be with fines.
Once it has come down to no one accepting offers, and passengers are randomly selected, if you then refuse, you can keep your seat, but you are fined an amount commensurate with what you are costing the airline.
Put that fine print into the contract, and you will be invoiced for the cost of staying in your seat (up to some reasonable amount), to be paid before the next time you fly with that airline.
Then they select a new victim for deplaning, and assuming that they are cooperative, they can get their vouchers, plus the refusing passenger’s fine, or use the money from the fine to pay for alternative ways of transporting their people.
I am not supporting the amount of force used if it was over the top…and if it was, that is on that individual police officer because there is nothing implicating the airline in what that officer did because they did not train him or even choose that he was the one assigned to that duty. I am supporting the right of the airlines to remove an unruly passenger who has disobeyed a captain’s direct command to vacate the airline. If the captain does not have the right to do this then airline security is a joke.
They stop when someone accepts their offer. It’s a pretty simple concept, really.
I’m trying to imagine myself in that exact situation. If they had offered say, $2000, and i didn’t need to be in Louisville straight away, i’d think about taking the money and spending $100 or so on a one-way rental. It’s about a five or six hour drive. I’d arrive in Louisville about 4 hours later than scheduled, with over $1500 in my pocket.
Yep. That’s one of the central points made by the Atlantic article i linked yesterday:
The existence of corporate oligopolies like this, combined with a legal system that’s far more friendly to companies than to consumers, means that there is very little incentives for companies to actually compete in the area of customer service.
As others have said, this incredibly simplistic observation assumes a conspiracy between about 200 strangers to jack up the price.
By your logic, no auctions would ever work, because the people involved could all simply collude to keep the price down, and would then agree on which buyer gets to reap the rewards of the group conspiracy.
What is “too much”? And why, in your mind, should calculations of “too much” be determined ONLY based on what is convenient or acceptable for the airlines.
If i’m a customer, needing to get to a destination, the airline’s happiness has a limited value to me too. Why not let us enter a negotiation, whereby we can arrive at a price that i’m willing to pay, and the airline is willing to accept. Why is it that a company with $40 billion in revenues, $22 billion in market capitalization, and a CEO earning over $5 million in salary alone, should get more consideration in a case like this than the everyday people who constitute its customer base?
You are right that the airline has an obligation to maximize revenue, but they should be able to do it without artificial help from the government that actually allows it to screw over its customers, and that makes it hard for customers to seek their legal remedies in court rather than company-chosen arbitration.
If they don’t like having to pay passengers who get bumped a fair price, and believe that this is cutting into their profit, they can choose more carefully exactly how many tickets they decide to sell for each flight.
Again, why do YOU (or, really, the company) get to decide what constitutes “(more than) reasonable compensation”? There IS no objective measure of what’s reasonable. What’s reasonable differs for each person, depending on their own financial situation and their own particular urgency regarding their travel. On any given flight, for those people, that number might range from a few hundred bucks to thousands.
This is interesting, i guess, but for me it’s irrelevant. My assessment of this situation has never been conditional on the particulars of the passenger affected. My concerns are about the legal and regulatory environment that allows this to happen, to anyone.
You made a sarcastic post that accused United of having a substantial degree of incompetence because a flight crew needed to get from Chicago to Louisville. Your criticism on this point should allow people to ask if you think such crew movements are unusual, or perhaps something that only United does.
If you acknowledge that moving crew from one airport to another, sometimes on an urgent basis, is a very routine thing that airlines do would settle that issue; but raise another as to why you decided that United should be criticized for not having backup crews anywhere they might possibly be needed.
I did no such thing. Kindly cite a post where I made the specific claim that needing to transport a flight crew was an indication of United’s incompetence or retract your claim.
They do appear to have acted incompetently, but that’s not the reason.
I welcome your explaination of “utterly failing” at a core aspect of a business’s functionality and using the word “incompetence” to describe this failure.
I will pull up a barber’s chair to watch this hair be split ever so finely.
It also only says they have the right to deny boarding if the plane was overbooked. But actually, the plane was not overbooked. UA just decided to kick off 4 passengers to make room for some of their own employees.
The Courier report says Dao attended medical school in Vietnam before moving to the US and is permitted to practice medicine in Kentucky.
It’s worth noting that current headlines project $1 billion in lost stock value for United – that’s not counting lost business, just stock fall.
But more to the point – last week bad weather at Delta’s hub canceled as many as 3,200 flights – an epic disaster. Yet Delta is smelling like a rose at the moment as news of its $11,000 offer contrasts with United’s “We’ll have you beaten by police” counteroffer.
You may continue (unconvincingly, in my opinion) to argue that United was within their rights, but you can’t deny that what they did – and have continued to do since – is tone-deaf and mind-bogglingly stupid.
Really, as an expert why couldn’t they have re-routed another crew?
The “experts” seem to think it was to avoid paying overtime etc…but as you are claiming that UA was forced to move this specific crew at the cost of their customers justify your claims.
It seems to me that an awful lot of people who are commenting on the internet about this story have never, or very rarely, been on an airplane before.:rolleyes:
The following announcement has been made on every flight I’ve ever been on:
“Federal law requires passengers to follow all lighted signs, placards, and crewmember instructions.” (Paraphrased)
Makes it sound like they decided to place him back on the plane, unfortunately. What actually happened was that he broke free, ran back into the plane and tried to hide in the back.