We know that airlines deal with this all the time, we know that other airlines and UA reroute, or reschedule crews to work around this all the time without deplaning customers. We know that if these two pilots and two cabin personnel were the only 4 people within the UA corp that could take their flights the next day the company screwed up on planning enough time, crew or resources.
The airline could have simply reserved seats for them, or are you really saying that it is a huge display of confidence when an airline needs to rip customers off a plane because they can’t book seats or…use a radio to say “hey we are late but we will make it in time don’t give our seats away”
But apparently that is “too hard” or “impossible” despite the fact that scheduling resources, and being prepared to deal with contingencies is kind of a required core skill for an Airline to succeed…luckily for UA in this environment customer service is not a required skill in that industry.
I can agree with this. It makes me wonder, though: what would have happened had this particular flight been grounded at the last second due to a mechanical issue? Would there have been absolutely no way whatsoever to get the four crewmembers to Louisville? No backup plan? Nothing?
Or, alternatively – what if those four crewmembers had been 30 minutes later than they were, and they didn’t arrive in time before that particular plane took off?
All those flights leaving from Louisville on Monday would have been cancelled and rescheduled due to lack of crew? Does that ever happen? I’m asking because I don’t know, myself … though I do know that planes can be grounded for mechanical reasons.
Given that … “crewmembers not flying due to mechanical issue” is functionally equivalent to “crewmembers not flying due to a full plane”. And, if we allow that … why wouldn’t the backup or emergency plan for one situation not be applied for the other?
I know, I know … there’s a contract and all. But still.
You falsely claimed that I had said “needing to transport a flight crew” was the action that had indicated United’s incompetence.
I called you out on that, as I had made no such claim that was the reason.
Now you’re making the false claim that I bristled at the term “incompetence”. I did not. I bristled at your false claim that I had cited “needing to transport a flight crew” as the reason for United’s incompetence. At no point did I deny United’s incompetence.
Now you can’t understand why I don’t defend a position I never took, you then falsely claimed I took, and which I specifically told you I never took?
Well, we can agree on one thing, this makes no sense whatsoever.
Whether you call it “call[ing] in the police to beat someone” or “call[ing] the police to remove a trespasser who refused to leave,” they did it to save money.
They chose the “we’ll make you four people leave” option rather than the “we’ll offer more money until we get four volunteers” option - in order to save money. What other reason could there have been for that choice?
Yeah…back in the early 60’s when planes were small, gas was cheap and flight scedules were far, FAR less packed I can see loading up that extra plane that happened to be in the hanger and flying a lone passenger that had been publicly guaranteed a flight.
This ain’t the 60’s, planes are a lot larger, fuel is a lot more expensive, and spare planes and crews available at the drop of a hat is a fevre dream.
Perhaps there was a backup plan. And perhaps they deemed it inferior for whatever reason to putting the crew on this flight, so they went with their first choice. Presumably, the planners were counting on everyone involved behaving like an adult; that in this case some fuckhead decided to channel his inner three-year-old is hardly something the planners can be faulted for not accounting for in advance.
Hell, maybe they did account for it and decided that on analysis of the risk of someone being a shit it was still a superior choice–and assuming their risk calculations were correct, the fact that this happened to be the one time out of a thousand or million or whatever that the shit hit the fan doesn’t make them wrong.
Unless you have evidence that they instructed that police officer to act as he did, then what you call it does matter. Do you have anything to show us that they called in people to beat that passenger, or not? If not, what’s wrong with saying what actually happened?
The one that involved a family of three adults bumped of off two separate flights and being put up two days in a hotel room? Leaving aside the costs of hotel and food, how much did each passenger receive per bumped flight?
As others have noted, it’s not like a planeload of people can easily conspire to refuse all bids until the bids get stratospheric.
Each person has their own valuation of their time and their appointments for the next day. If they raise their offer by a couple hundred dollars at a time, along the way individual passengers will say, “that’s a good enough deal for me,” and by the time (in this case) four people’s prices have been met, everyone’s happy. But no one can hold out to soak the airline because a planeful of people will undercut them.
If you would kindly read what I wrote, and was responding to, you would make more sense.
If you want to argue that point, that’s fine. You and I happen to agree on that point, as I’ve already told you, but you seem to still want to argue about it with me. So WTF, dude?
But I didn’t want to argue either side of it with Beren. I wanted to to just debate him over whether they did what they did for money or not.
So you admit this is purely opinion despite the fact that you debased people up thread for sharing what you claimed were just opinions?
The general consensus looking at discussions by people actually in the industry is that this was unprofessional and was most likely meant to save the company money to avoid the cost of rerouting a crew or paying overtime.
This is the dance that they have to do every day…UA decided to error on the side of profits at the cost of customer satisfaction.
It if was due to a flu break out, emergency or weather event the company could have said so in their press release…and the public would be considerably less critical.
The fact that they admitted that this is policy to just avoid rerouting a dead headed crew ie exactly why the shit hit the fan and why they are wrong.
If you’d like – we could also do it without straw-manning about wanting to change the rules retroactively, when most of the discussion is about dumb business practices and how the rules should change going forward.
I’ll let the airline’s actions going forward indicate “what makes them wrong”. They absolutely will treat this incident as an instructive one, and not as a one-off that need never be accounted for in the future. Keep in mind that this is the era of the cell-phone video and social media – the calculus is different now than it was even a decade ago.