Thursday, April 13, 2017

Doubling Down

In my last post, I joined with the thousands (millions?) of other bloggers out there who are piling on to United Airlines for their determination to set customer relations back a hundred years by not just bumping customers off of overbooked flights but actually using the seats freed up that way to move their own employees around the country. Since the story first broke the victim in the original story has retained legal counsel and the CEO of United has issued a real apology for the incident – in that order, unfortunately. Whether that will help with the multiple lawsuits that are about the hit the company remains to be seen, but over the last day or so a similar event has popped up in the news that has even more disturbing implications…

You can pick up the original story off of the Los Angeles Times website if you want to, but apparently there was a United passenger who needed to get from Hawaii to Los Angeles in time for a business meeting, so he paid for a full-price first-class ticket. He had already boarded the plane on Kauai and was enjoying the complimentary orange juice prior to takeoff when a United ramp agent ran onto the plane and told him he had to get off. Upon asking, the passenger in our story discovered that United had overbooked the flight, and were going to give away his seat to a passenger with “higher status.” Apparently there is a pecking order among frequent flyers (based on number of hours flown, maybe?), and the company will cheerfully screw over anyone if a higher-ranking customer wants their seat…

I’m already on record as saying that the company’s handling of the original situation was asinine, and I’ll stand behind that, but at least we can consider the idea that moving the four crew members would prevent the cancellation of an entire flight – that is, the company was accepting annoying four customers to avoid completely browning off two hundred of them. In the Hawaii case, however, the only advantage the company seems to have gained was the chance to suck up to someone who already flies with them all the time, while at the same time costing themselves another frequent flyer, everyone from his company, and anyone else who might be concerned with being bumped off their flight by someone whom the airline likes more than them…

Now, we should probably note that, like overbooking, bumping passengers to make room for VIP customers is a long-standing practice on all of the airlines. In some cases there might even be a sound business reason for doing so, as in the case of emergency travel or a family trying to get somewhere together. But the idea that every business practice that was acceptable in 1931 (when the company began flight operations) is still reasonable today is utter nonsense, and the assumption that your customers will put up with being displaced purely at the whim of some slightly more frequent flyer is demonstrably preposterous. It took a week of pushback, and the threat of even more legal action, before the company even came up with a written apology and reimbursed the customer for the price difference between his full-fare first-class ticket and the middle seat in Economy class they ended up sticking him into…

I’m not sure how much more of this knavery, chicanery and buffoonery the United Airlines stockholders are going to tolerate; I know that I personally would have started demanding resignations from everyone responsible for this crap starting with the “United Breaks Guitars” episode involving Dave Carroll. I’m also fairly sure there’s a limit to the number of times a company facing strong competition, rising costs, falling revenues, customer dissatisfaction, and an increasingly hostile operating environment world-wide can go alienating current and potential customers by making mistakes that any small child could tell them are idiotic…

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