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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?

#71

Post by courtneypowell »

dsl wrote: post #60
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.

The company is not required to engage with us in anyway to access a complaint. And specifically in this case, they ignored not only tweets coming from PublikDemand but from me as well. We simply help the consumer get attention when they weren't being helped otherwise.

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

#73

Post by courtneypowell »

dsl wrote: post #66
JeremyBanks wrote: post #13

Was this Tweet the only one made @United from the account before it was blocked, or were there others? https://twitter.com/PublikDemand/status/309093527697104898 If that's the only one, that's very surprising. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would spur an instant block, even from an overprotective overzealous social media rep.

That tweet looks like a trolling attempt to me. I would have responded and directed them to have the customer contact the company directly and then blocked them.

I would love any suggestions for making tweets look less "spammy". We face that problem daily.

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

#74

Post by mikeash »

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…

The occasional mistake is forgivable. But this was not "a mistake". This was a long series of serious mistakes, and that just shouldn't happen.

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

#75

Post by 8ig8 »

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 can't believe that airlines accept the liability of flying unaccompanied minors. It seems they have so much to lose when something like this happens.

I understand the need/demand. So if the airlines stop offering it, I'm sure some kind of private travel companionship service would develop. They might be more expensive, but as their primary business, they may be able to provide a higher level of service/assurance.

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

#76

Post by javajosh »

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…

If you're going to reap the benefits of scale in business, then you also have to be prepared to accept the drawbacks.

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

#77

Post by mikeash »

jowiar wrote: post #63

From http://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/travel/specialneeds/... What if my child’s travel is affected by delays, cancellations or other problems? It can be very stressful when flights do not operate as planned, especially for unaccompanied children. In the case of weather or other delays and cancellations, United will contact you or the person designated to meet your child at his or her final destination. You ca…

Your proposal to plan better would make more sense if airline travel didn't require an order of magnitude or two more advance planning than weather forecasts can provide.

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

#78

Post by mherdeg »

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…

For the specific case of air travel, your description of the system you want almost perfectly describes the system that actually exists today, the United States Department of Transportation consumer complaint database & process.

In this specific case, the Department of Transportation does maintain a database of complaints about air carriers: see http://www.dot.gov/airconsumer/file-consumer-complaint#Airli... . The DoT publishes frequent reports about these data.

Anyone can file a DoT complaint about an air carrier. In my experience, United treats the number of DoT complaints they receive each month as a core key performance indicator and they take a very strong business message from every DoT complaint they receive.

The one time I've filed a DoT complaint about United, I got a personal phone call within days from a UA executive in Houston who understood the scenario exactly and gave me evidence that the situation had been resolved. They were clearly documenting this not only for me but also for the DoT to prove that they had resolved the complaint appropriately.

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

#80

Post by guyzero »

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…

If supervising unaccompanied minors is too hard, they're under no requirement to offer the service. They offered the service and then they screwed up delivering it. I don't see why you should be sympathetic.
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