I got places to be too, and I fucking paid for my seat.
United employees can book their flights like the rest of us.[/quote]
To be halfway fair, this was a flight crew that needed to be (a) available and (b) rested - which I gather has a legal definition in this case - so that they could fly ANOTHER plane the next day. United was in a position where they had to screw over four passengers Sunday so that they didn’t have to cancel a flight and screw over 150-300 passengers on Monday.
Of course there is a larger question as to why the airline can’t get logistics on their crews right the first time, but that’s an problem that had already occurred. They were trying to execute “Plan B”.
Yeah, I used to work on operations software for airlines, and flight crew would not be able to work the following day without a sufficient gap between the flight that got them to Louisville and when their flight out of Louisville departed.
Airlines would not be able to operate without reliably being able to shuffle their crew around to cover for other delays and to comply with the many, many regulations about when and how they can work. And the fixes can be extremely complicated – 5 or 6 layers of moving people or delaying a flight by a few minutes. It happens constantly.
Am I missing something? The rights for a cancellation don’t seem significantly different than what you get in the US:
[quote=“website”] My flight is due to depart from London this morning but I have just received a text from the airline advising that the flight has been cancelled. Do I have any rights?
YES - you have rights under EU rules. You are entitled to reimbursement of the full cost of your ticket for the part of your journey not made or re-routing at the earliest opportunity. If you are already at the airport and you opt for re-routing, you are also entitled to meals and refreshments in proportion to your waiting time, and two telephone calls, texts or emails. You are also entitled to overnight accommodation if you are to be re-routed the day after your planned flight and, depending on the circumstances, to monetary compensation.[/quote]
Seems like you get a refund or a seat on the next available flight. You get food and a hotel stay if the next available flight is a ways off. Oh, also two free emails. Yay?
Agreed it doesn’t somehow prove that the airline mode is right. But, it doesn’t also prove it is wrong, either. That’s because the two are just amazingly unrelated. Their cost and revenue models are drastically different.
Heck, you’re better off asking why taxis can afford to drive around with one passenger. At least that’s transportation related. Of course, even that is still too drastically different to draw any conclusions.
Basically, I don’t think you can run an airline based solely on experience in operating a movie theater, or vice versa.
Are they so different, though? I get that an airline is not a sports franchise, but the basic problem is the same for both. Ticket prices must result in profit for the company based on attendance/bookings. We’ve already agreed that one of the issues is that airlines don’t charge enough to cover their empty seats.
Yes. At a minimum, their revenue models are hugely different. TV rights for example, are a significant portion of sports revenue. On seats, a lot of the seating issues are about market and placement. The seating price is much more elastic than airline seats, because it’s the market (and team performance) that dictate sales, rather than direct ticket price and highly fungible competition. You either go see the local team or you don’t. Few people drive to the next market.
On costs, again, hugely different. Sports teams have huge sunk costs on stadium building, but often offset by local government. Again, a factor of selecting the market and balancing sunk costs versus greater market potential. Roster is another high cost. You can save on roster if your market won’t fill the seats on a regular basis and a bit of improvement in the standings won’t realize into more butts in seats. For airlines, fuel prices and betting right on the futures market can make or break a certain route. Buying the right planes, that fit the needs of the routes, is also huge.
Regulatory issues are another whole bag of cats that is different between the two.
I’m frankly not sure why anyone would think they’re even vaguely close.
The difference is that transportation is considered more fungible than performance. I think there is some merit to the argument. If a dispatcher sends cab #750 to pick me up from the airport when I was expecting cab #832, the harm is minimal. But if I expect to see a World Series game and end up watching a preseason match, there is a significant loss.
Now, the lines are blurred when comparing edge cases like movie showings (basically interchangeable) and airline flights (often time critical). But at least there is a rationale for the status quo.
Perhaps blurred a little, but the big difference is that movie theaters rarely (if ever?) overbook because they aren’t in a system where people buy seats substantially in advance. They basically have real time data on actual seat occupancy when they get around to selling the top off tickets.
The real flip side of overbooking is cancellation policies. Airlines could avoid overbooking if they made cancellation much more difficult/costly. But consumers hate that, too. So assuming that the system is at equilibrium (and my understanding is that airlines, as an investment, underperform the market), if you drop the ability to overbook, you either have to a) increase base prices or b) tighten up on cancellation.
I didn’t say they’re close at all. I acknowledge that the market forces and circumstances are different. I’m saying the very basic issue is the same. The seats need to pay for the business, and airlines aren’t doing it. They’ve priced themselves into a situation in which the tickets don’t cover the cost of no-shows so they frequently overbook or book to capacity and then don’t have room for their own crew.
Edit: And honestly, part of that is our own damn fault. No one wants to pay $1300 for a quick flight to the next town over, so we expect cutthroat rates and price wars.
I think you can make an argument that airlines are dealing with all this, via market segmentation. Your business class and first class seats are “traditional” air service ala the 50s. High cost, relatively reliable, and high service. Your economy seats are Greyhound as another poster put it. The airlines see different demand with different motivations and different price elasticity, and respond accordingly.
I highly suspect that the first class and business class passengers on that United flight were not at risk for involuntary removal via the “random” selection.
Probably not the premier or platinum, that other group that not first class but gets to board early group. I’m curious what they used as “random”. Someone just pulled a name out of a hat or… and why did the CEO say they went up to 1000 when the media said 800. It’s not a huge difference I know but why did they stop at all. Just keep going up until someone volunteers.
The real difference between a movie theater and a airline flight are the high per-flight costs of running the flight - fuel, maintenance on the plane, paying a small, pretty well-paid army of pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers, gate agents etc. to deal with that specific flight. So you need to make sure the plane is pretty damn full before you schedule that additional flight.
The variable costs of scheduling one more showing of a movie, on the other hand, are minimal. Most of the costs of running the theater (heat, rent, etc.) are fixed costs - you’re going to pay them whether you schedule an additional show or not. The variable costs are a handful of minimum-wage ticket takers and concession vendors. As long as you’re making enough enough to cover those, you might as well open up, even if the theater is 90% empty.
A baseball game is another thing again. Even if there are no butts in seats, there’s still money coming in from TV rights. And on top of that there’s revenue sharing - basically other teams paying you to stay open so they have someone to play against.
True and true, but movies are edge cases. Other performances, like Broadway shows or sporting events, have high running costs and often sell out in advance. But they still don’t overbook their seats…
Well that and they have to lose money in some situations. I was on a 747 to San Francisco on a connecting flight. There was some sort of freak storm going on at the connecting airport. It was me and 6 other people and nearly as many attendants and that’s it when it took off. No one else could get into the airport due to the storm. They flew that plane damn near empty, and I got to hear the life story of an attendant who was once a lawyer for almost 4 hours.
Here’s the thing though. There are other industries that run tight margins, as in high costs high revenue, tons of them! The only ones that typically treat their customers like garbage are the ones with sanctioned monopolies like the cable company, utilities, airlines…
Someone said we can vote with our wallet. Yeah, yeah sure. I’ll just sit in my tiny piece of the world and claim how great America is by never actually leaving it. I’ll get in my time machine and make sure my parents have children in an area that has all the jobs and college opportunities i need within driving distance too. Oh and just in case I get really sick, I’ll be sure to live next to the hospital with the best specialists for whatever random disease I wind up having.
Based on United Airlines’ contract of carriage (more on that below), passengers with disabilities and unaccompanied minors are the least likely to bumped from a flight.
For everyone else, the contract says that the airline’s decision is based on a passenger’s frequent-flyer status, the layout of his or her itinerary (whether the passenger has a connecting flight), the fare class of the ticket, and the time he or she checked in to the flight." (emphasis mine)
