Imagine how the next United forced volunteer bumping session will go down.
“We’re all filming this!”
This could be solved so easy by this rule: first come, first served, if bumps happen, take volunteers first, if no volunteers, the last to arrive at the airport gets bumped but gets max compensation allowed- no matter what class of customer they are.
Increase the max compensation to a minimum of $2,000.
Typically there are people that get good deals with the knowledge that they’ll be bumped if this sort of thing happens.
I suspect United threw their people in after the fact, which is to say, no one was flying on a “overbook” ticket with the expectation that they might be delayed.
Jesus Christ.
I’m actually kind of surprised nobody has been violently ejected from the airplane before when refusing a forced overbooking. I mean, cellphones with cameras and internet video sharing have been a solid thing for the last 5 years or so…
This says, to me, that this security person and/or staff went a “little” off book in this particular case.
A Doctor being on a flight is already doing the airline a favour as sometimes they have to examine sick or injured passengers mid-flight. In return they should automatically get exemptions from this kind of thing (even nonviolent incentives). If he does have patients to see the next day, that is 1000x more important than the stupid scheduling mix up that means United are sans 4 employees at another airport.
Yeah but I don’t trust people’s self-offered “reasons” they can’t be overbooked off the plane. This is like the reasons you can’t be a part of jury duty. 90% of the time it is bullshit.
Who knows, maybe he was telling the truth, but I’d go with
The difficulty is in determining what constitutes the last to arrive at the airport. Boarding passes can generally be printed from home 24 hours in advance of the flight. How do we know ho arrived last?
[quote=“wumpus, post:47, topic:129243, full:true”]
Yeah but I don’t trust people’s self-offered “reasons” they can’t be overbooked off the plane. This is like the reasons you can’t be a part of jury duty. 90% of the time it is bullshit.[/quote]
Don’t Doctors have medical licenses they can show? I’m assuming those are actually licenses that fit in a wallet like drivers get. Although now that I type that out I am not sure why I would assume that.
Every time I’ve flown recently the flights have been overbooked. They do indeed do an auction thing, starting usually at like $500 airline bucks (not real money, good only for their tickets) and I’ve seen 'em go to a max of a thousand.
This case wasn’t exactly overbooking, though, was it? Or at least, it seems like it was a combo of that and United operational needs.
In any case, 1) it’s horrible; 2) United sucks; 3) you have nearly no rights at all anywhere in or near an airport or airplane these days. Welcome to the inevitable result of our addiction to security theater.
I’m so confused, especially since I"m the only one who seems to be confused by this matter.
If a flight is overbooked, wouldn’t the last people to check in not have seat assignments, and thus they would be the ones booted? Why wouldn’t the solve the overbooking issue prior to boarding so they don’t have to kick people off, that seems like the sane way to handle it. Then when the computer kicks someone off because no one gives up their seat the scanner before boarding rejects them, and if they try to run through into the plane anyway it becomes a felony.
I just don’t understand how it got to this point where they had to remove someone from the plane due to over booking. Presumably if they were overbooked several people were standing because there were no seats for them to sit on, and those people should have been auto-booted.
Yes, this is part of the many, many mistakes that were made here…
Normally, the airlines do try to nip this in the bud before the flight gets boarded. Here, United needed 4 seats for their own employees to fly “standby” to get on another flight and no one volunteered when they first asked people at the gate. I assume they had to load the plane even though no one volunteered because they wanted to keep the schedule. Then, when no one volunteered when they asked again with more money offered, the whole situation went sideways.
Technically, the flight wasn’t “overbooked” so much as it was “booked to passenger capacity” which didn’t account for the 4 employees that needed to get to their next flight. Why/how United didn’t figure for their own employee transportation is a big part of the problem.
Hahaha ok that’s what I was missing. I didn’t realize the “overbooking” was because of their own employees, which makes this whole thing even more monumentally stupid.
Everybody is blaming United but don’t the cops themselves deserve some of the blame? Airport police are real police. The people that are there to protect citizens from bad guys.
The airline employees didn’t beat anybody up, the cops did.
I was recently catching a flight that was delayed over an hour because they were waiting on a flight attendant. My guess is the four employees probably had to go to the destination because they were needed on other flights that would not have been allowed to otherwise take off. So I can see how there might be some real urgency to get the employees on the flight.
(As an aside, when we did finally board the plane the flight attendant who did the pre-flight safety announcement prefaced it by telling us how “really, really tired” the crew was. What a stupid thing to say.)
Ironically, you can partially blame Reagan for this entire mess because it was his administration which began mass firings of federal aviation employees, pushing more and more of the industry toward privatization, thus resulting in the current mess where flying is an abysmal process.
As we’ve discussed in the thread on cop shootings, etc., there are a lot of us here who feel that today’s police are trained in a system that no longer exists to preserve and protect, but to CYA, that is, cover their own asses, above and beyond everything else. Recruiting people to police forces who meet the sort of criteria most of us would think would be necessary has proven next to impossible, so what we get, all too often is people whose primary qualifications seem to be a desire to hit people, shoot people, and exercise petty power.
And a lot of the airports get the dregs of that pool of talent.
People often make fun of middle managers, but this is one of those times that demonstrates it can be an super-important job. You’ve got a 22 Billion dollar company laid low by the lack of good executive action.
Even if you ignore the huge reputation hit, you’ve got 4 people at ~$1000 each (800 + hotel). For $4000, you easily could get an executive car service to drive those four to there destination in a limo or custom van and still have a chunk of change left over.
Instead, you end up with this.
Fuck that noise.
I got places to be too, and I fucking paid for my seat.
United employees can book their flights like the rest of us.