Not Even Trying

Suppose for a moment that you were a parent traveling with children, possibly small children, and when you attempted to book tickets in the same row with your children (and spouse) you were told that the airline was going to charge you an additional fee for letting your party sit together. Let us further suppose that you asked the justification for this peculiar charge, and were told that there was no particular reason for the practice; the airline was just doing it as a way to wring more revenue from each flight, because they can. And, just to cap things off, let us suppose that you asked what the CEO of the airline thought about this practice, only to be told that the whole thing had been his idea in the first place. Would you still book the tickets?

Since you’re reading this story on my blog (assuming I have readers) you’ve probably figured out by now that this is an actual policy at United Airlines, according to an interview with their CEO on the Flyer Talk site this week. United President Scott Kirby claimed that the practice was just a matter of the company charging extra for a superior product – effectively, increasing the price because of value added – and defended it on the grounds that all companies charge extra for more valuable products or services, and airlines shouldn’t be any different. Whether he was missing the point deliberately or just brushing off the reporter isn’t clear from the article, but I feel it’s worth raising the issue anyway…

In general, any business policy that involves forcibly separating parents from their children – or extorting money from them in exchange for not doing so – is going to cause trouble, particularly if there isn’t any objective reason for doing so. Leaving aside over-protective parents who literally carry their children everywhere until the kids are school-age, most people find travel with small children stressful enough without having to worry about where they might be or what they might be doing/breaking/ingesting at any given moment. For that matter, most other travelers don’t particularly want to have to consider the complications of sitting with unaccompanied children just because the airline wants to make a few extra dollars. If this story is accurate, though, United is running the risk of irritating every customer on a given flight…

Now, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I consider annoying the customer to be a colossally bad idea; I’ve gone so far as to suggest that the Second Law of Business should be not to do this. In the case of a company like United, which is already having public image and customer relations issues due to things like having customers dragged off of flights (and possibly beaten), this policy goes beyond “stupid” and is careening directly toward “complete fiduciary misconduct.” While I can admire Mr. Kirby’s honesty and candor, I can’t help feeling that he’s not even trying to understand the potential shortcomings of the policy he is defending. If I still owned stock in United (I don’t) I might be trying to sell it, but I’d almost certainly be trying to oust the CEO at the next proxy vote…

From this perspective, I can’t actually tell if this policy (or admitting to it in public, at least) is insanely brave, utterly tone-deaf, or unbelievably arrogant. All I can tell you for sure is that none of these are adjectives that I want to associate with a company with which I do business, or with the senior management personnel of such a company. If United wants to improve relations with its customer, or at least stop being the punchline of jokes written by millions of scruffy bloggers across the Internet, they need to at least try to consider the needs of their passengers. Before things get any worse…