Your incentive to settle for $2000 is that if I am on your flight and they make an offer like that I will jump at it looooooong before it gets anywhere near a million. Guaranteed.
And I lose nothing and my life goes on exactly as it has before. You, on the other hand, have taken a bad deal when you went in knowing you could hold out for more.
[ul]
[li]This story has turned into an intense, global media shitstorm for United.[/li][li]Tens of thousands of people have expressed outrage and said they will not fly United anymore.[/li][li]A nationwide boycott is being called for in China, one of United’s biggest markets.[/li][li]The officer in question is under review. The Chicago Dept. of Aviation said the incident was “not in accordance with our standard operating procedure and the actions of the aviation security officer are obviously not condoned.” (Read that again if you need to).[/li][li]The CEO of the company has abjectly apologized, saying the passenger was “mistreated” and that United will “fix what’s broken.”[/li][/ul]
And yet, there are still people in this thread doggedly defending their actions. At what point do you guys take a step back and say, “Maybe I should re-think this?”
Sez you but from where I sit you were foolish and I have $2000 in my pocket.
But the real point, as numerous other posters have pointed out, there will ALWAYS be someone who will take the deal loooooong before it gets to your mythical million. And you will still be sitting there on the plane with nothing.
We’re talking about a situation where this sort of “auction” would be happening hundreds of thousands of times a year. It only takes one planeload of sufficient stubborn people to hold out for immense sums before it goes viral and everyone realizes they can do it.
By this logic, i assume that you also don’t have a job, because you’re holding out for one that pays enough in one day to last the rest of your life.
It may startle you to know this, but the vast majority of people, even those who can afford to fly on a regular basis, earn a lot less than $2000 a day. Even if the airline can’t get you on a flight for another 24 hours, and you have to make an overnight stay in a hotel room, you’re still making more than the vast majority of Americans. And this is precisely why there will ALWAYS be someone who will jump at an offer like this.
No-one is saying that it has to be you. In fact, if it’s not worth $2000 to you, then you definitely should NOT accept the airline’s offer. That’s precisely the point here: to create a situation where there is an opportunity for ALL of the passengers to determine what it is worth to them to miss the flight.
And if you think that this will constantly result in million-dollar payouts, might i suggest that you don’t understand game theory quite as well as you seem to think.
Delta actually offers VISA gift cards, and they seem to be willing to pay a lot more than United was to get volunteers. The $800 offered by United is significant I think because it is about how much they would have to pay if they forced someone off the plane. So United is not willing to offer more for a volunteer than they would have to pay if they violently “re-accomodated” the passenger off the plane with a bloody face.
Why MUST that be the rule? Why can’t the rule be that you cannot forcibly eject paying passengers who are behaving themselves. What safety issue did this passenger present?
Overbooking is fine as long as the airlines recognize that there is a cost side to the “cost benefit” of overbooking
I wonder how THAT happened? If your flight crew is late for a flight, your airline pays something like $20,000/hour your plane is sitting at the gate so the airline is real anxious to get their crew to the flight on time.
I guess this is hopeless. You will mainly either be influenced by the fact that virtually everyone else who has responded thinks your view is completely detached from reality…or more likely not.
But just to try on merits one more time, the concept of ‘opportunity cost’ brought up by mhendo you seemed to gloss over. If the bidding got to $5k (which I gtee you it never would no matter how ‘stubborn’ a group of passengers were unless they could instantly agree to collude and trust the winner to split the winnings) and somebody else took it, you would in fact lose something. You’d lose the excess which $5k represents over your real opportunity cost of having to hang around in Chicago for another day, which is very likely a lot less than $5k as it would be for most people. It would cost you that to not jump on the $5k. And believe me somebody else would realize that even if you somehow don’t.
He was disobeying the instructions of the flight crew, which is both a federal crime and a severe threat to the lives of his fellow passengers and crew.
Planning for delay events is the airline’s job. The plane might be delayed for other reasons. Even if the staff are able to board, they still might not be able to fly. If that happens, then United surely has contingency plans. I’m saying this is just one more situation in which they have to go to that contingency. Pulling a passenger off a plane to use his seat for someone else should not be an option.
Sorry. What I mean to say is that this is the worst kind of armchair speculation. You don’t know what someone is capable or not capable of doing.
Who said anything about colluding or splitting the winnings? This is based on pure self-interest; if you offer me $X with the caveat that, if I don’t accept, you’ll offer me $2X, then it’s in my interest to decline and take my chances that my fellow passengers aren’t going to get suckered in by a cheap deal. And once people start hearing in the news about the one guy in Poughkeepsie who got $50000 for his seat, nobody’s going to want to be the sucker who settled for a $200 voucher.
Yeah, okay, you’ll take your chances. And you’ll lose, because someone else won’t. You’ll never get $1 million, so there’s no risk to the airline that they’ll have to pay $1 million.
Exactly. There are lots and lots of people with flexible travel arrangements - backpackers, retirees, self-employed folks, and students among many others - who would be more than happy to spend another in a city for USD$2,000 in actual money.
For some people that could be a month’s income or even more - they’d be quite happy to take the money, enjoy a complimentary hotel room and a complimentary replacement flight the next day AND have a stack of green notes with Ben Franklin on them for their trouble.
I have to say, this is a fascinating read. I’m usually on the fence or at least apathetic in these long drawn-out threads. I’ve never been more certain of my stance in this one.
The passenger was totally at fault here.
Sent from my adequate mobile device using Tapatalk.
Why can you not see that no one is ever going to be given a choice between $2,000 and $1 million? That’s not the equation available to you in an auction. Once the price reaches “that’s good enough” for an individual, he is going to take it rather than risk losing it to someone else.
And just as a reminder of United’s stellar history of customer service — “United Breaks Guitars” —
