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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?

#31

Post by courtneypowell »

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…

This is a difficult problem to solve, one that we have been working on for a while at PublikDemand. We have hoards of people with the same complaint against a company and are trying how to best unite them and allow them use the collective voice to demand change.

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

#35

Post by cmiles74 »

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…

I couldn't find this bit about the airport and the same-sex chaperone in the article... The only relevant bit was:

"The little girl ended up staying ten hours, overnight, at the Denver International Airport before being rerouted through Houston."

Did they in fact put the child in a hotel with a chaperon? That might sway my opinion a bit.

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

#36

Post by venus »

cmiles74 wrote: post #35
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…

I couldn't find this bit about the airport and the same-sex chaperone in the article... The only relevant bit was: "The little girl ended up staying ten hours, overnight, at the Denver International Airport before being rerouted through Houston." Did they in fact put the child in a hotel with a chaperon? That might sway my opinion a bit.

Down the bottom of http://www.publikdemand.com/united/ckmnaguilar08/my-daughter...

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

#37

Post by krautsourced »

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…

Yeah, sorry. Had the misfortune of flying with United some time ago, and it was just one fuckup after the other. Out of 5 flights only one went without problems (the international one), all national ones were foobar.

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

#38

Post by benologist »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #26
benologist wrote: post #4

The important thing is they're building a new lounge and smisek wore a hardhat to tell us about it. Where is the line between civil and criminal when it comes to caring for children?

It has nothing to do with children, that merely makes the underlying behavior more obvious. It's the difference between treating customers like cattle and like human beings. It's the difference between a company that assumes it is entitled to the business of its customers and one that believes it has to earn it. Sadly there are far too many of the first category.

I don't think it could be that simple when children are involved, there are pretty significant consequences for parents that do a shitty job of caring for them and I assume day care, schools etc have strict regulations.

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

#39

Post by ohashi »

cmiles74 wrote: post #30
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 might feel some small smidgin' of sympathy if it weren't for (1) the fact that this isn't the first story like this and (2) they charge money to chaperon a minor and simply did not do it.

Or contact the parents and live up to the promises made to parents.

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

#40

Post by thedragon4453 »

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.

$150 isn't enough to make sure the kid gets to their connection or someone calls the parents when something goes wrong?
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