I'm on the doctor's side, United should not overbook a plane and bump a customer to get their own people on board, but when someone refuses to leave what other options do you have? Taze him and drag him off? You'll have to use force to remove someone.
1. continue escalating their shitty voucher bribes : sooner or later someone's gonna bite
2. arrange alternate air transport for the crew : they're already in an airport, and 2 of their competitors (American, Southwest) have multiple direct flights between Chicago and Louisville each day
3. arrange ground transport : otherwise known as renting a car and driving. Not super fun, but I've had ironically had United pull that shit on me from NYC to DC - i.e. they cancelled a flight and put us on an overnight coach bus. If it's good enough for customers, it's good enough for the crew.
4. suck it up and delay whatever flight that crew was scheduled for. It sucks, but it was their mistake to overbook and this isn't a safety-critical situation.
Bottom line, there are about 951 different ways to tackle this problem and they chose the absolutely worst one out of the bunch. That kind of stupidity is legitimately impressive to behold.
Isn't there a good chance this happened anyway? I heard the plane was grounded for 2 hours.
What else can you do?! Am I right?!
How do you feel? It is dark, rainy and tomorrow at 8 you have a job interview in the city.
You better pack up nicely and quickly, because I'll call the cops otherwise.
Let me know if you feel like you'd understand the situation.
They should not get into this situation. At ALL. They should, like they normally do, handle overbooking at the boarding stage -- by either offering compensation or by issuing IDB checks to people they choose to prevent from boarding.
What happened is major mistake and is morally despicable. I hope the passenger gets punitive damages.
Pay another airline to ship your employees. This is nothing but horrible planning on United's part. Worst case: Google Maps says a 5-hour drive separates Chicago from Louisville.
In the free market, you offer enough money until someone decides that the offer is good enough. Everybody has a price.
In a fascist place, you call the thugs to punch an asian doctor unconscious, so that he can be dragged away from his (paid) seat, so that employees can take their (free) seats
Ok, we're offering $10,000 to anyone who gets off.
I see twenty hands and we only need four.
How about $8,000, ok, down to 19 hands.
10 minutes later, and they probably would have ended up paying LESS than $800/seat.
DOT, Air passenger "Bill of Rights"
https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/fly-rights#Overbo...
> If the substitute transportation is scheduled to get you to your destination more than two hours later (four hours internationally), or if the airline does not make any substitute travel arrangements for you, the compensation doubles (400% of your one-way fare, $1350 maximum).