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Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

publikdemand.com

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Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#51

Post by 3327 »

petenixey wrote: post #28
pud wrote: post #22

Part of me feels bad for United here. They're bound to make some mistakes when flying millions of people around the planet every day. But thanks to social media, all it takes is one of those mistakes to turn into a viral blog post -- and now you've got a PR crisis. Not defending United or saying they didn't screw up. They did. But dang it, as an entrepreneur, that business seems really f'ing complex and I feel for th…

It is a complex business but this error wasn't caused by complexity. It was caused by a combination of dreadful management, low quality standards and bad reporting. There are so many examples of people being badly treated by United that as awful as this story is, it's probably also acting as a nucleation point for the general anger and disappointment they have created. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Breaks_Guita…

agree, I flew with United this past month, long story short, my boarding pass got confiscated by ground crew, when I claimed i wasn't happy with their service for another matter, and only when I threatened with calling the police was it given back to me at the gate. I wrote to customer service but canned response was the best I got. Never flying them again. US airline industry needs a serious disruptions - end of story. Look at IRR on these companies, they have been relative disasters for investors. Most should have gone under a while ago... Too big to fail I guess...

Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#52

Post by girvo »

shrikant wrote: post #48

All this reminds me of when I used to fly internationally as an "Unaccompanied Minor" in the early 90s. This clusterfuck would NEVER have happened back then (at least never happened to me..) -- kids travelling alone were treated like royalty. I'd randomly get bumped up to First Class, be able to use the nice lounges in airports, and got put up in really nice hotels when flights were delayed too long. All this amidst…

I used to do the same, flew as a UM once a year. So much fun :)

Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#54

Post by sukuriant »

shrikant wrote: post #48

All this reminds me of when I used to fly internationally as an "Unaccompanied Minor" in the early 90s. This clusterfuck would NEVER have happened back then (at least never happened to me..) -- kids travelling alone were treated like royalty. I'd randomly get bumped up to First Class, be able to use the nice lounges in airports, and got put up in really nice hotels when flights were delayed too long. All this amidst…

You mean you were treated in such a way that it was always known where you were so these sorts of things couldn't happen? (hey! He's playing with his toys in the lounge! I can HEAR the gameboy and him clicking on it; and oh, I'll go give him another treat so I know for sure he's there every few minutes!)

Yeah, they were checking on you every time they brought snacks and toys, and doing their best to keep you entertained so you didn't do bad things. And that is what they should be doing: watching out for you.

Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#55

Post by ColinWright »

shrikant wrote: post #48

All this reminds me of when I used to fly internationally as an "Unaccompanied Minor" in the early 90s. This clusterfuck would NEVER have happened back then (at least never happened to me..) -- kids travelling alone were treated like royalty. I'd randomly get bumped up to First Class, be able to use the nice lounges in airports, and got put up in really nice hotels when flights were delayed too long. All this amidst…

If you were flying as an unaccompanied minor in the early 90s you are not a curmudgeonly old fart. Get off my lawn!

Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#56

Post by jussij »

paulsutter wrote: post #20

Airlines need to start charging enough for their child chaperone service to operate it with the level of care and communication required. $150 seems low for a high touch personal service with brand/life-threatening failure modes.

Or at a minimum don't pretend to have a chaperone service when you don't and worse still charge $150-00 for a service that clearly does not exist.

Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#57

Post by Zak »

pud wrote: post #22

Part of me feels bad for United here. They're bound to make some mistakes when flying millions of people around the planet every day. But thanks to social media, all it takes is one of those mistakes to turn into a viral blog post -- and now you've got a PR crisis. Not defending United or saying they didn't screw up. They did. But dang it, as an entrepreneur, that business seems really f'ing complex and I feel for th…

I don't think the original failure is that big a deal; the child wasn't in any danger and could easily communicate with her mother. I agree with you that things of that sort are inevitable when running an airline.

The problem is the customer service response. Asking a parent looking for her child to fill out a form when your company is supposed to know where she is is not acceptable. Blocking someone trying to get a customer service response on social media is not acceptable.

Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#58

Post by Adaptive »

elliptic wrote: post #23

And now Continental's just as bad. Almost makes me want to move to Singapore.

Upvote. Singapore would probably drive me mad eventually, but there really is nothing like flying into that airport. My wife and I regularly argue whether SIN or HKG is superior. Our conversation on entering the arrival hall is always the same: "maybe we should move back..."

Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#59

Post by rm999 »

javajosh wrote: post #21

I propose a solution to this and all related problems. It is a law that every legal entity in the United States must maintain a public, permanent record of any and all complaints against it. They may choose to publish individual responses, but this is not required. This would solve the problem of aggregating complaints. The first line of defense of a large entity is information asymmetry: they isolate the customer, m…

I'd be concerned about complaint spam, which could quickly devalue a system like that. A small number of legitimate complaints (like in this story) could be drowned out by thousands of pointless/fake complaints.

See, for example, this story: http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2004/12/4442-2/

>You may have also heard that in recent years complaints about TV have gone through the roof, from a mere 350 complaints in 2000 to a whopping 240,000 in 2003, and potentially even more this year ... The problem is that, unfortunately, these massive numbers all boil down to one politically motivated group with an axe to grind.

I'm sure there are ways to make it more difficult to file a complaint, but that just leads to bureaucracy. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the system would have to be executed very well or every airline will have a few million complaints that are impossible to search through.

Re: Why did United neglect to tell parents of a minor she was rerouted?

#60

Post by dsl »

venus wrote: post #29

What is this hysterical nonsense? Fine, UA should have called the mother to let her know what was going on. Someone screwed up. But they obviously went to a lot of effort to take care of the kid, putting her up in a hotel to wait for the next flight, with a UA employee of the same sex chaperoning her. The case was seized upon by what appears to be a professionally outraged busybody trying to "monetize" shrill complai…

PublikDemand leaves the same sort of taste in my mouth as GetSatisfaction. They build a 3rd party forum for users to try and resolve issues, then people get outraged when the company doesn't jump on the new communication method.

IMHO, United shouldn't be discussing a customers business with PublikDemand anyway. Just like I can't call up American Express and ask them why they haven't raised your credit limit.

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