Which Airline Kicks Off the Most Passengers?
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
The reason that United needed 4 seats is because they had a last-minute crew to fly to Louisville. And the law says that their own employees can NOT take precedence over paying passengers.
EDIT: Since some asked for a citation for the latter: 14 CFR 250.2a: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.2a
Do you have a citation for this?
> United spokesman Jonathan Guerin said Tuesday that all 70 seats on United Express Flight 3411 were filled, but the plane was not overbooked as the airline previously reported.
A cursory search turns up a couple links.[0][1] It seems to involve the fact they had to deplane passengers who had already boarded, rather than merely deny them boarding.
[0] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/04/11/united-den...
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_...
Assuming it does apply, there's no outright prohibition on denial of boarding to confirmed reserved space passengers. It merely says that the airline must ensure that the smallest practicable number of confirmed reserve space passengers are involuntarily denied boarding.
The deadheading crew was likely using positive-space employee passes that had a higher seating priority than any ticketed passengers on the flight. According to the definition of "confirmed reserved space"[0], those employees may very well qualify as such. I could find no specific statement suggesting that employees are not considered passengers for the purposes of the definition, let alone deadheading employees that are not involved in the operation of that particular flight.
There's even a section on boarding priority that's pretty vague and largely boils down to having a reasonable policy in place to deal with situations where insufficient volunteers come forward to take advantage of compensation.[1]
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/index.php?width=840&...
[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/how-delta-masters-t...
[1] American Express gift card
If the bump delays you by <2hrs (generally unlikely), it's 2x ticket price or $650 (again, whichever is lower).
You were probably entitled to $1350, so you really didn't do that great.
That is also how much the United passenger is/was entitled to.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2008/04/18/08-1145...
Auctions maximize utility for the sellers and buyers of the inconvenience. A fixed price means that there will be a surplus or shortage of willing passengers. That means there will be some situations where an airline pays more than it should and people are disappointed they weren't chosen, and some situations where there are irate passengers that inevitably result in violence.
JumpCrisscross did well, by definition, because JumpCrisscross is happy with the transaction. A lot of people would be very unhappy with $1350 for a delay depending on the day. Considering that $1000 was a positive outcome, I fail to see how $13.50 (1% chance of being chosen for $1350 award) is preferable.
But if it was voluntary, the monetary option is not mandated. So when they ask if anyone wants to volunteer for a voucher, accepting that offer is volunteering, and writing yourself out of the cash option. (The airline can still offer it, but they no longer have to offer it).
How can this be ethical? The customer is doing a favor by giving up their seat, shouldn't they at least tell them what options are available?
If I were an airline employee, I'd need to draw out a flowchart to remember all this.
In the case of United, if by "pay" you mean give you a voucher (or N vouchers of value 1/N of the total, only 1 of which can be used at a time) for travel on their airline, to be used in 1 year, not to be combined with other offers, yada yada... No wonder no one wanted to take them up!
Relevant text:
>Except as provided below, the airline must give each passenger who qualified for involuntary denied boarding compensation a payment by cash or check for the amount specified above... The air carrier may offer free or discounted transportation in place of the cash payment.... The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment...
Full text:
>Except as provided below, the airline must give each passenger who qualified for involuntary denied boarding compensation a payment by cash or check for the amount specified above, on the day and at the place the involuntary denied boarding occurs. If the airline arranges alternate transportation for the passenger's convenience that departs before the payment can be made, the payment shall be sent to the passenger within 24 hours. The air carrier may offer free or discounted transportation in place of the cash payment. In that event, the carrier must disclose all material restrictions on the use of the free or discounted transportation before the passenger decides whether to accept the transportation in lieu of a cash or check payment. The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment or refuse all compensation and bring private legal action.
The difference was that United had many options at their disposal and chose one of the least humane methods in a civilized society.
Furthermore, the leaked internal memo by the CEO shows a clear lack of empathy and I see a lot of similarities between what happened on the plane and the PR aftermath. In both cases, instead of choosing alternative choices that would come with some cost to the company(increasing the bounty to give up the seat, apologizing profusely for the incident) in exchange for rectifying a situation, they doubled down on bad choices (violent removal, written accusations against the passengers behaviour).
Honestly, this would be non-story had they just upped the compensation to anyone interested in the plane.
And on a side note, it's kind of sad how one of humans greatest technological achievements, the airplane, is associated with one of the least liked experiences in North America, namely going through airports, security, and dealing with airlines.
The last few mergers shouldn't have been permitted.
Airlines increasingly wanted to grow the flying population, by lowering prices. More people have access to airplanes now, and so they have turned into what was traditionally the service and experience of a bus.
We would be so lucky if flying had the service and experience of a bus!
If you upgrade enough to private then you can get the flying experience of the 50s: Small Planes, no security, walk on the tarmac.
It's like paying more puts you further back in time.
I don't live in the US but I remember when flying last year there were few sectors in which there was only one airline operating (if memory serves right, there was just United between Las Vegas and SF). So, even if I'm disgusted by the way United treats its passengers, I have no choice.
The little that I've understood of airlines and their economics, I think the best way out is to nationalise all the airlines and let them be run as a public utility. Introducing capitalistic principles has either kicked off a race-to-the-bottom on prices, miles and treating customers like cattle.
In this case, United boarded the flight without considering the flight crew they needed to put on the flight -- putting them in the situation of removing four passengers.
I get the feeling that this is missing the point
> Like it or not, about 40,000 people a year are kicked off planes against their will. Some of them were standby passengers who knew this might happen. Some weren't. Given those numbers, the interesting thing isn't that United had to remove one of these folks by force. The interesting thing is that apparently it's never happened before.
> It hasn't happened while cell phones were recording the whole thing, anyway
Did this person even watch the video? I seriously doubt regular instances of violent deplanings wouldn't be a point of pop culture by now if "against their will" always ended with a man being dragged bleeding off a plane
And overbooking is legal because it is not illegal.
And when you have 2% of your passengers not turning up on every flight, and flight margins of <$100 profit per plane (during the worst times), not per passenger, you need to overbook.
Why is that a problem? They've paid for a service and not used it.
Airlines don't care about unused seats, if they did we'd have last minute rates like we do for hotels. Hotels know it's better to have someone pay $20 a night than to have their capacity go unused at $50 so they'll drop the price for booking a day or two in advance.
Airlines do the opposite, they charge more for booking late.
So airlines make the most revenue by setting prices low early on, and higher toward the flight date. They certainly care about unused seats, but the revenue from expensive last-minute bookings normally outweighs the revenue they would get from filling all remaining seats at a discounted price.
They do their best to minimize unused seats by getting the prices right early on, and adjusting based on observed demand. But at a certain point, it makes sense to raise prices even if it's highly likely that there will be unused seats.
If they offer $500 and one of the passengers takes it, he can't just rock up after the flight to ask for more money.
Maybe we need to start a Airline Passenger's Union, so that we have some collective bargaining power when an airline wants to bump passengers, and instead of them convincing individuals to accept less than they deserve, we convince the airlines to pay more than mandated.
Without that, things would be straightforward: buy the ticket, board the plane, loose the ticket if you don't.
With the ticket being a different thing from a "reserved seat in a specific flight", you end up with overbooking (selling more tickets than the flight can handle because usually someone will loose the flight, or will change it to another day). You end up with companies that don't want to lose the last seat in exchange of a small fee (it's better to sell another full ticket, no?).
Perhaps prices would go up a bit. Perhaps people would be more pissed off when they loose the flight. I don't know.
I just know that it began as a model that made sense at the time, and small changes added-up so that we are in this situation, now.
http://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-united...
The stats he references do not point to de-planing - a term he invents only for this article.
All those involuntary denial of boardings he references are before passengers board the plane. Which makes a huge difference.
The paper he links to (indirectly) makes zero mention of passengers being kicked off planes. They only make reference to involuntary denial of boarding, which happens before passengers get on the plane.
I think there's only one other comment in this entire thread that makes this point.
Just thinking it through a bit, you can see it makes no sense. If a plane is oversold, how the hell do they let the passengers board? You'd have two people trying to sit in the same seat.
It'd be nice if all airlines, other than not overbooking, chose Delta's approach. Deplane option right as you check in.
The priority of all other confirmed passengers may be determined based on a passenger’s fare class, itinerary, status of frequent flyer program membership, and the time in which the passenger presents him/herself for check-in without advanced seat assignment.
(and, imho, a complete failure that this had to happen in their seats. It's difficult to take 'no' for an answer when everyone's seated and watching, because they'll just learn that 'no' works and answer the same way. Denying someone boarding and evicting them once they're seated are essentially the same legally, they're not 'boarded' until the doors are closed. But logistically, entirely different)
Also, it's come out that United's so-called "random" method was a sort based on frequent flier status and then (potentially) price paid for ticket. If that's really the case, they targeted their least valuable one-time customers first.. aka people who "next time" was months or years down the road.
As someone with status, I get their reasoning but let's be honest and not call it "random."
So now if you want to talk about crypto with them, it's instantly so problematic you'd just have to back the train way up. It's like the Feynman magnets video. Pointless without the necessary basic understanding.
Not that I would mind the equivalence. On the other hand imagine the furore we'd see when a full-price customer got bumped.
Well at least we have numbers and pretty graphs.