You’ve just taken your seat on a commercial jetliner. The plane is full. The crew gets on the public-address system and asks passengers to give up their seats in exchange for an $800 travel voucher.
No one takes the offer. The plane is overbooked. The airline, United Airlines, needs to find four seats for UAL employees to occupy to fly to their destination.
No one takes volunteers to leave. So what does UAL do? It selects four passengers randomly. The airline demands they leave. Most of them do, begrudgingly. Then they approach a gentleman, a physician whose name was drawn. He says he won’t get off; he has patients to see at the other end of the flight.
The airline then calls the cops, who struggled with the guy and dragged him off the plane.
Customer service, anyone? is this how you treat folks who shell out good money to use your product, which happens to be an overbooked jetliner?
This incident erupted at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The plane was bound for Louisville, Ky.
How does the airline justify what occurred?
Someone has some explaining to do
I believe I have a solution: How about United — and all other commercial air carriers, for that matter — stop the practice of “overbooking” their flights? I understand the need to ensure a full airplane, but this is the kind of story that surprises me in one way: I’m surprised we haven’t more of these kinds of incidents already.
The doc had to get to his destination because he had patients waiting for him. Couldn’t the airline have picked another name? Couldn’t it have found another way to get their employees to Louisville?
Some passengers recorded the incident on their cell phones. Some of them were heard yelling their anger at the airline for the rough manner in which they treated the doctor. They were outraged, I’m telling ya.
Interesting, yes? Any one of them perhaps could have given up their seat to avoid the disgraceful behavior and the humiliation suffered by the physician on board. But they didn’t.
Meanwhile, United Airlines had better offer some justification for treating a paying customer in such a brutish manner.
I don’t fly a lot – perhaps once or twice per year – beginning and ending in Anchorage.
Still, since 1977, all of the “majors” have treated me shabbily, except Alaska Airlines. I suspect they treat their employees well – most of them seem to like attending the flights I take. And I suspect AK Air overbooks, too – that is hardly new thing.
As for this United Airlines incident, an auction seems like it might have done the trick – surely less costly than the bad press this poorly-run fiasco ginned up. Or a combo of auction and letting the UA employees wait for another flight.