I’m sure I do, but excuse me if I ignore your comment. Because I damn sure know how money works, and I know that vouchers often don’t work anywhere near the same.
Keep in mind that the flight in question was delayed over two hours. Spending even 30 minutes on the auction would’ve been totally worth it.
Just do it right from the get-go and you minimize the time taken dramatically. Sure if you roll out with “a $100 voucher … no takers … OK, a $150 voucher … anyone, anyone? … Beuller? …” – yeah, that would take all day.
But is the airline motivated to get those seats or not? If so – really and truly so – time will be no issue. Bust out with a grand in cash to start ($1000 sounds 10 times better than even $900).
And try to calibrate with the level of imposition you’re asking the passengers to accept. Asking people to get on a flight 2 hours later? Maybe start with $200, $400 or so. Asking people to stay overnight? Start in the low four figures, hoping to get lucky, but be aware that you may have to push five to ten grand.
…
Or else ditch all that and use Delta’s existing reverse auction scheme, where flyers indicate their price to deboard upfront when they book.
No need for a max amount (not sure if you’re still on that), no plausible reasoning given by you, let alone the much more out there thinking of Smapti, the number would ever be large relative daily incomes, hotels ticket prices, etc. Which also discounts the chances the auction would be very long slowly stepping up to some high number, it never would.
And this incident delayed the flight over two hours, no matter whose ‘fault’. The extra time to go from $800 (funny money voucher) no takers to virtual certain takers in the $1k-$2k (real money) range is not material relative to that. The airline can decide how to optimize whether lift it in smaller or larger increments to save time but sub optimize slightly, say in case $1k doesn’t do it, they up it to $1.5k and it does, but $1.2k would also have worked but they skipped over it.
Beyond that it’s ‘what if’ stuff with no plausible reason to think the probability is material enough to worry about. What if the plane crashes despite all best efforts? But that’s a one in a million (at the least) and we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.
United had to put out a statement, obviously, as did the security company. They’ve got PR people who handle these things.
I know, how about a bunch of people who know little if anything about operating an airline attempt to re-write all the rules of acceptability?
How long do you really think it’ll take?
Anyone give up their seat for $400?
No? $600?
No? $800?
No? $1000?
No? $1200?
You there, you’ll give up your seat for $1200?
Thank you, your cash, new ticket, and hotel voucher will be waiting for you at the gate.
Could be done in less than 3 minutes. Less time than it takes to convince even just a somewhat reluctant passenger to be involuntarily bumped, and far less time than if the passenger refuses. How long was that plane delayed, 2 1/2 hours? Do you really think that was a great use of time?
As earlier stated, it’s not very likely that the cash to give up your seat is going to get to anything astronomical, because I will take it before it gets there, and as such, it’s not going to take all that many rounds of bidding either.
Yeah, there were probably enough people ignorant enough to transfer anger to a group of people who went where they were told to go and had nothing to do with what did or didn’t happen to a passenger. That’ll show them!
Exactly. Why is this even being debated? Knowing the maximum the airline will offer you is fairly useless info. The info you need to know is the lowest offer every single other passenger will take, so you can undercut them (should you choose to do so). There is only one “winner” in this auction, and to be the “winner,” you have to be the first person to bid lower than everyone else.
Yeah, that would be a lot simpler. No involuntary bumping, and incentives have to be cash (and a hotel room in the case of overnight delays).
and we shall call them Congress.
Not that it’s an excuse for how United handled Dr. Dao’s “re-accomodation”*, but the good doctor is probably not going to be confused with Marcus Welby.
*"It took virtually no time for his hometown paper, the Courier-Journal, to point out that Dao, a father of five and grandfather who went to medical school in Vietnam, had his medical license suspended for about 10 years for illegally prescribing painkillers, including to a patient in exchange for sex. It’s all a matter of public record.
TMZ reported that while his medical license was suspended, Dao “made a killing” as a World Series of Poker player, earning a total of $234,664.
There is no getting around Dao’s history now that it is public, but the reports raised the ire of many on social media who argued that Dao’s background wasn’t known and shouldn’t have been relevant to his treatment on the plane, and that it appeared to be another case of blaming the victim."*
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/real-time/United-passenger-doctor-troubled-past-debate.html
*might have an impact on the outcome of any lawsuit though.
Guy looks pretty good for 69.
It certainly matters to the “He had patients he had to see” argument…but apparently not to those who are making it still.
From the flyertalk.com stuff that bordelond spoilered in post #812 (bolding mine):
IF this guy has it right, the airline had no margin of error at all on getting the crew from Denver to Louisville in time to have their mandated rest before their flight out of Louisville the following morning. In which case that would be the underlying problem, since it would have only taken a mild delay to make them ineligible to fly the 9:20am flight from Louisville.
That link wouldn’t respond for me, but as of yesterday some were pointing out the original Sino-Vietnamese given name of the guy convicted for the drug charges wasn’t the same as the guy as on the plane. Maybe it was still him, does your link deal with that issue specifically?
Anyway I agree it’s completely irrelevant to UAL’s stupidity, could theoretically affect a jury though and that might feed back to some degree to the big out of court settlement he’s going to get. And BTW if you’re running a business and have to pay a big settlement with lots of negative PR, you f*cked up, period. ‘But we were right’ is only relevant to the personal vanity of private business owners kidding themselves that that makes any difference business wise which it doesn’t, and it’s more clearly and totally irrelevant for publicly traded companies.
Knowing all about how human beings should and should not be treated in this situation trumps having deep expertise in how the airline industry works.
What are the penalties for violating mandatory rest times for crew? I ask becuase I don’t know, and it’s not something that I am finding easily.
Is it something ridiculous, like millions of dollars for every minute violation, or is it a couple hundred, or maybe a few thousand dollars for the violation?
If the former, then obviously, the airline is not going to violate it, but in the latter case, it could just be a cost of doing business.
Man, you really hate this guy. Did he cut you off in traffic or something? 
I almost missed my favorite part of the story:
“Everything” was injured? Let the lawyer do the talking, buddy, because exaggerations like that from a doctor just won’t fly in court.
Transferring anger or something?
This allegation has been brought up repeatedly in this thread, but last time I checked, it wasn’t settled whether Dr. David Dao, the would-be passenger, was the same person as this Dr. David Dao who had his medical license suspended. Have these doubts been resolved?
(Not sure whose argument is still dependent on whether he had patients to see, but if you say so, I’ll take your word that someone’s still making such an argument.)