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Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

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Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#71

Post by nraynaud »

scosman wrote: post #44
cube00 wrote: post #4

If they had just increased the compensation passengers would have voluntarily given up their seat, everyone has their price. It didn't even need to be money, free flights, upgrades, it costs them next to nothing, especially when you consider this is still running in the media days later. Everyone hates to hear they overbook flights so you'd think when they get bitten United would take some of the savings made overboo…

Exactly! United overbooked as an optimization for profits, fine. However, they should have to pay up when it backfires. They gave up at $800 and just started forcing people off. If it's free market when I'm buying my ticket, it should be free market for United buying it back.

It looks like it's not an overbooking at all, they just had employees showing up after the plane was full and united decided to kick some passenger out for them. But those employees were not paying nor were they planned to come on board before.

Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#72

Post by maxerickson »

kps wrote: post #35
maxerickson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it was stupid business not to offer more money for other people to leave the plane (or to find some other way to move the crew), there's nothing to argue about there. What did they do that should be illegal? Overselling each flight makes the tickets cheaper. People want cheaper tickets. So it isn't obvious to me that over selling is wrong. Is the problem that they failed to stop the people boarding before deciding…

An honest way to overbook would be to sell seats beyond capacity as standby.

They are just selling all/most seats as standby.

Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#73

Post by katbyte »

valuearb wrote: post #37
Oletros wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was a Dr. going to work

He is allegedly a doctor, not a demigod. Someone else can cover his shift.

If i have an appointment to see a specialist that i've been waiting months for, another doctor can't just 'cover his shift'

Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#74

Post by Oletros »

valuearb wrote: post #37
Oletros wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was a Dr. going to work

He is allegedly a doctor, not a demigod. Someone else can cover his shift.

The op asked "why did the doc need to be on exactly that plane"

I answered his question, I didn't say anything about demigods.

Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#75

Post by valuearb »

Shivetya wrote: post #28
dingaling wrote: post #5

This e-mail illustrates the complete imbalance of the "contract" of carriage between passenger and airline, which is compounded by the Federal Aviation Regulations that give the crew ultimate power even when there's no safety risk[0]. The CEO states that the flight was 'fully boarded' and then later that it was decided to 'deny boarding' to four passengers. So was it fully boarded or not? It doesn't really matter, th…

I take issue with the idea it was over booked when it was the airline wanting to transport its own people in place of booked customers. If anything we shall get to witness if the power of social media can overcome such abuse, It has helped turn the tables a bit with policing but usually only when it occurs in a public setting. People do need to take note that this actually is another case of police abuse just at the…

So United should not have tried to board their flight personnel so that another plane full of passengers could sit on the tarmac for hours in Louisville with no crew?

Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#76

Post by BlackFly »

trollied wrote: post #12
libc wrote: post #6

The fact that the airline technically didn't do anything illegal here really speaks to the lack of consumer protection laws in this country.

Some people appear to think that what they did wasn't legal. See: http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/593329-usa-today-ua-forci...

That is a fantastic link. Summary of the points:

CFR 250.2a covers overbooking but only applies before boarding. Since the United employees had no confirmed reserved seats on the aircraft, they cannot be given priority over a customer with a confirmed reserved seat.

The passenger was already boarded, so they cannot rely on oversales rules to refuse service. Instead they need to rely on their Contract of Carriage which does not allow them to eject customers for any reason whatsoever. The most circular thing they could eject him for was failure to follow the terms of the contract of carriage for refusing to disembark. They publicly stated that their reason for asking him to leave was because he was selected by a computer, but this is not allowed by their rule 21.

They had no legal right to refuse him service at that point.

Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#77

Post by devy »

protomyth wrote: post #57

Can someone explain how this was an "oversales" situation since the plane was actually fully booked and not over sold, and with that how United's action didn't violate the law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/part-250 https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?packageI...

It simply wasn't - until United's crew members came on board. And United put prioritize employees over its boarded customers (if there are going to bump passengers out, they should never issue boarding pass in the first place).

Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#78

Post by benji-york »

valuearb wrote: post #24
libc wrote: post #6

The fact that the airline technically didn't do anything illegal here really speaks to the lack of consumer protection laws in this country.

Airlines overbook because people don't show up for flights. Overbooking means airlines can offer passengers refundable tickets. Occasionally they get it wrong and have too many people show up. So they offer compensation to get people to voluntarily give up seats. If they can't get people to voluntarily give up seats they have the right to pick who to deny service to (but by law have to pay specific compensation to).…

Indeed: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/tod...

Re: Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal

#79

Post by smitherfield »

MandieD wrote: post #33
tyingq wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jimmy Kimmel pointed out the main reason why they get away with this. “The next time we book a flight, it doesn’t matter if it’s United or Delta or American, if one of those flights is a dollar less than the other one, that’s the one we’ll pick. They know this. That’s why we’re stuck with them.” I don't understand the dynamics of how it ended up this way. Air travel used to be a luxury, and had fairly high margins. T…

One word: deregulation. It's been a very sharp double-edged sword: on the one hand, it gave us effective competitors like Southwest and jetBlue forcing the "legacy" carriers to compete on price and routes, enabling far more people to be able to fly. On the other, it caused the legacy carriers compete on price, not service (the only thing they could really compete on before deregulation). Personally, I fly Southwest a…

Deregulation is the reason the middle class can afford to fly at all. Pre-deregulation, a Boston-LA flight would be $500 in 1978 dollars.
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