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Remove United from your flight results

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Re: Remove United from your flight results

#231

Post by frobozz »

kelnos wrote: post #194
nathanvanfleet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So laws evaporate for the sake of corporate efficiency? This kind of deference to authority and lack of empathy is alarming me.

How is that for the sake of corporate efficiency? If you can't get a crew to a plane they're supposed to work on in time, you have to cancel the flight, and then instead of inconveniencing (in this case) the four passengers they chose to bump, you inconvenience an entire plane of passengers.

That is exactly corporate efficiency. Less efficient solutions that don't inconvenience passengers include:

* maintaining extra crew on standby at each airport, in case of no-shows by the scheduled crew.

* reserving (i.e. not selling) space on flights specifically for such crew transport.

* buying seats for them on other airlines, chartering a small aircraft, or other means of transport.

* offering enough cash to persuade volunteers to debark. Considering that the alternative is to compensate an entire planeful, the budget for this is a lot higher than 4*$800.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#232

Post by chrisbennet »

zzrg wrote: post #229
braveo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I've seen several people not seem to understand. A large part of why people are upset about it isn't just the physical brutality, it's the act of FORCIBLY removing someone from a plane after they've: 1. paid 2. boarded 3. spent all the time going through customs, etc. The fact that he got brutalized, even if it was not purposeful, is secondary. If you read through this very thread you'll see most of…

What should they have done instead?

United should have offered more $ to get people to volunteer.

Saying that they couldn't get volunteers is like saying you can't hire developers - you can get either if you offer the market rate. Instead, United decided to use muscle instead of compensating customers for what was United's mistake.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#233

Post by zzrg »

chrisbennet wrote: post #232
zzrg wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should they have done instead?

United should have offered more $ to get people to volunteer. Saying that they couldn't get volunteers is like saying you can't hire developers - you can get either if you offer the market rate. Instead, United decided to use muscle instead of compensating customers for what was United's mistake.

I don't think the level of moral outrage you're expressing is commensurate with the position "the only thing United did wrong was setting their cap for overbooked flight compensation too low." And in any case, that cap is set by the department of transportation.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#234

Post by dredmorbius »

singlow wrote: post #144
braveo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the point that seems to get missed a lot. yes, the police did the brutalizing, but all of the decisions that lead to that confrontation were UA's. It's akin to arguing we shouldn't lock up people who pay for assassins, only the assassins themselves. And I'm not trying to compare an assassination to what UA did, only point out that the law doesn't give you a pass because you weren't the one who physically did…

But you can't be prosecuted because you called the police and the police beat someone up. Unless the police officer was conspiring with you to do something criminal, their illegal acts are not your responsibility. If I call the police because there is someone suspicious in my neighborhood and they show up and end up shooting an innocent person, I am not responsible for the shooting. The only exception I can imagine i…

See: SWATing.

Also, given the publicity here, there's no reasonable claim any competent airline could make that calling the cops to remove a passenger, for the airline's own initial fuckup, wouldn't result in harm to the passenger.

Which makes the case one of premeditated or negligent battery.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#235

Post by fapjacks »

The last time I flew United is also the day I vowed never to fly United ever again. A couple of months ago, I was flying out of SFO. I always bought the priority boarding just because I get anxious when I have to wait for things. Anyway, I was at the front of the boarding line and watched this whole thing unfold. The United gate agents were being really short with people before boarding began. Once boarding began, and some people were scanning their boarding passes, the head gate agent decided that every passenger (every single one) needed to put their carry-on into the stupid metal sizing box. But by the time he had decided this, one of the first class passengers had already gone onto the plane. The gate agent said "sir" half-heartedly down the hallway to the plane, but he must have already boarded. The gate agent guy got extremely mad, started yelling about the passenger, and got on the phone and called the airport police. Boarding had been completely stopped at that point, and we all waited for the police to pull this first class passenger off the plane. The guy was completely innocent, and it delayed our flight by perhaps half an hour. It was astonishing, even after my previous pattern of waiting four or more hours for delays on what should have been a short commuter flight.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#236

Post by drjesusphd »

arcticbull wrote: post #218
btgeekboy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already too late to buy the stock on sale. From 5 days ago, UAL is down only 0.19%. With DAL -.07%, LUV +4.04%, and ALK -1.54%, it's hard to argue that one-off situations like this event, or Delta's multiple days of cancellations, have much of an effect on investors. https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

As they say: 'sell hubris, buy humiliation.'

This appears to be both.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#237

Post by lolc »

hexane360 wrote: post #223
perseusprime11 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of culture, United needs to learn from Southwest. Southwest has great culture internally as well as externally. United has bunch of slogans as culture. Their CEO has no clue about creating a culture that delights customers. He blamed the customer in the letter and then blamed it on system failure but never on him. He failed to create a customer centric culture and instead fostered a culture that perceives cu…

Do you have some examples of Southwest's good culture? My only experiences with Southwest have been negative. a) They're always more expensive on the flights I take. b) They hide their fares from aggregators like Google Flights.

In a surprise event, a Hacker News commenter discovers correlation between price and quality, spurs entirely new branch of economic research.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#239

Post by Yizahi »

johnfn wrote: post #103
rm999 wrote: post #69

The comments in here are oddly fatalist about the whole thing. We put a lot of trust in airlines; and not just in safety or to get us somewhere, but we also give them an unusual number of legal protections once we're in their care. When the drama first started I kind of wrote it off: "this must have been a misunderstanding compounded by a single employee's stupidity". But when I found that it was not only condoned, b…

> Then, the inevitable outrage led to past stories resurfacing, with a pattern of absurd insensitivity (abused dogs, broken guitars, sexist clothing policies, etc). You don't think you'd be able to dredge up similarly bad stories for any other airline? Look, what United did on that flight was pretty awful. But the rest of this to me smacks of the typical rumor mill that spins up when a company has bad PR, which surfa…

>You don't think you'd be able to dredge up similarly bad stories for any other airline?

Hitting paying customer head on the armrest until he lost consciousness? I think no. I hope you don't believe "he fell" united version, because that's literally impossible in the economy seats. I may eventually come to terms with the loss of several hundreds dollars (or 1-2 thousand, due to lost car and hotel reservations) but concussion is inexcusable offense for me. I won't tolerate that ever.

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