Airline Disengenuousness

mscard88 said:
Not limited to just that airline. They (airlines) all have employees like that.
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I’ve seen a lot more with that airline though in recent years though. And it is more the AMR component than the others.
 
Fearless Tower said:
These days, all it takes is that one bad apple to pick a fight with a pax and you airline is going to make the front page of CNN.

Parker needs to figure that out before he tries to add another disgruntled employee group to the mix.
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I don't disagree (believe me, the pilots deal with it too), but what do you do about it in today's legal environment? The airlines are too lawsuit averse to do anything about it.
 
You know, I wouldn't want that cello strapped in between me and the aisle, nope. Any idea which seats she and the cello were in? The other thing is pitch and width measurements are 2 parts of our 3d world. Cellos are long too. I wonder if there is a difference between the 37 and 67 in height above the seat cushion. Cellos don't bend at the waist.
 
In addition to the "only having to buy one hotel room instead of two," I'd add that the cello wouldn't be making any in-flight purchases. Obviously I'm not an airline pilot but I've studied their revenue models in economics classes and the margins on the airfares are usually pretty small. The in-flight purchases like premium entertainment and booze are where much of their profits come from. A cello won't order a vodka tonic and and a PPV movie.
 
Gerhardt said:
Hotel room and dinner doesn't put me where I paid to be....home.

I've never understood the whole overbooking problem. An airline shouldn't be allowed to sell a seat to more than one person. And someone who buys a ticket shouldn't be allowed to cancel last-minute and say they'll use it another time.

Most of the time I fly commercially it's taking the family on vacation. Probably 1/3 of the time there's an overbooking problem. And several times we've been forced to later flights because of it. The problem is that the time at our vacation spot is shortened by a day (3 days once). Never mind the fact that we're out the cost of the pre-paid hotel...just losing your vacation for no good reason is frustrating.

If I was king for a day that kind of thing would stop.
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Gerhardt said:
That's what I'm saying. Put me in charge and when someone books a seat...they pay for it and it's theirs...no refunds. No overbooking required and no overbooking allowed.
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This. When you book a week at a vacation house or a yacht, if you don't show up on day 1 too bad so sad there are no prorated refunds. And what if you are flying for an important job interview or a doctor appointment (some specialists in high demand book months or even a year out). The airlines are pretty flippant about kicking people off but it can be costly and more than just inconvenient to the bumped pax and no, a paid hotel plus meal doesn't come close to making things right.

I often hear an announcement at the gate that they are requesting volunteers to wait for another flight so I guess sometimes they try to resolve it without having to choose an unwilling bumpee but I have yet to see first hand someone in a specific seat once seated to be asked to get up and leave. I think they must usually get it resolved prior to boarding.

There are some people who are very squeaky wheels and browbeat others into getting their way, and then there are self-important politicians throwing around their weight and I can imagine two people of that type told they can't board and raising such a stink at the gate that the crew deplanes someone already seated, I'm sure it happens and that might be what occurred here.

But we don't know for sure. Unless someone videoed what happened on the plane we can't be sure the cellist didn't do something to get herself kicked off, although if that were the case you would think the airline would say so.
 
kayoh190 said:
I don't disagree (believe me, the pilots deal with it too), but what do you do about it in today's legal environment? The airlines are too lawsuit averse to do anything about it.
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I don't think it is a legal issue. Its a culture issue.

First, the airline needs to acknowledge that there ARE culture problems related to the mergers. You have to address the culture to find ways to (1) build a common culture that seeks operational excellence while (2) identifying and addressing those employees who won't let go of their bitterness. You have to find ways to weed or sideline those people or they will continue to spread their toxicity.

I have friends at all the majors, and AA stands out as unique in this realm right now. You don't hear Delta or Southwest people trash talk their airline. Even United with all of Munoz' media foibles, people are surprisingly defensive of their airline. But their is a lot of bad blood still present in AA and its mostly the AMR people who watched their upper management follow the Toys R Us path and stick it to the employees while they packed their golden parachutes.

Some people seem to have a hard time letting that go, but unless you address those pockets of toxicity, they present a danger of spreading to the new blood.

The other thing that might help is to train cabin crews and gate agents to work harder to defuse situations. It may or may not have been a factor in this particular case, but in too many of these social media vs airline cases, we see an FA or Gate Agent behaving poorly and no one else seems to try to step in and take over. You don't see much good cop/bad cop exchange. I think a lot of these situations could be defused or minimized by simply having another employee take over the handling of the dispute.
 
Fearless Tower said:
I have friends at all the majors, and AA stands out as unique in this realm right now.
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I'm guessing the friends you're talking about are pilots. This cello issue (or any of the other customer service issues that generate these threads) didn't happen because of the pilots. As Greg mentioned we're trained to stay out of this stuff unless it becomes absolutely necessary. When the door is open the airline has customer service managers that are specifically trained to handle these things. And indeed, there's an ongoing company wide initiative where every customer facing working group *except* the pilots are required to attend workshops to learn how to better de-escalate customer service issues. So the company knows it has work to do.

You and I have disagreed before about the pilot group being miserable (and if you've *never* met an angry guy at Delta or SWA you just need a bigger sample size!). I'm not discounting your friends' experience, nor do I really disagree about the different cultures from the three airlines causing problems, but I just can't seem to connect it to being the source of customer service issues like what generated this thread. An FA being rude like what you experienced on your flight? Sure. But making an arbitrary decision to remove a cello from a seat just because she's ****ed about a merger? I'm just not seeing it.
 
It’s all about the money,flight was most likely overbooked,cheapest option ,was to make up a story ,and remove the woman and her instrument. The cello didn’t complain,and definitely didn’t eat.so for the price of a hotel room,the airline gets away with overbooking again.
 
Gerhardt said:
That's what I'm saying. Put me in charge and when someone books a seat...they pay for it and it's theirs...no refunds. No overbooking required and no overbooking allowed.
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You only have to pay full fare(or at least something more than the cheapest fare on the flight) and check-in early(online) to avoid being bumped. I have never ran into being bumped from a flight, even on overbooked flights. And I always pay the cheapest possible rate. Admittedly, i do not fly very often commercially these days, but still.
 
kayoh190 said:
I'm guessing the friends you're talking about are pilots.
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You'd guess wrong. About half of the people I know from AA are FAs. Not just pilots. I hear the same issues from them as the pilots. And I wasn't blaming the problem on lack of pilot involvement.
 
Fearless Tower said:
You'd guess wrong. About half of the people I know from AA are FAs. Not just pilots. I hear the same issues from them as the pilots. And I wasn't blaming the problem on lack of pilot involvement.
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Okay, fair enough. I'm only personally friends with two FAs, so it's not really a good sample size.
 
kayoh190 said:
You and I have disagreed before about the pilot group being miserable (and if you've *never* met an angry guy at Delta or SWA you just need a bigger sample size!). I'm not discounting your friends' experience, nor do I really disagree about the different cultures from the three airlines causing problems, but I just can't seem to connect it to being the source of customer service issues like what generated this thread. An FA being rude like what you experienced on your flight? Sure. But making an arbitrary decision to remove a cello from a seat just because she's ****ed about a merger? I'm just not seeing it.
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Let's just say that this incident comes right on the heels of a yet another miserable AA experience that I had this weekend. Some affected me personally and some were observations of certain cabin crew members treating passengers poorly. And it's culture. You can tell when some people are just unhappy in their jobs and pass on their bitterness to the people they interact with. It can be fixed. I just don't see anyone there trying to fix it.
 
mscard88 said:
Airlines are allowed to overbook because passengers will make numerous reservations to cover their agenda and then cancel one or more leaving the airline with empty seats and less revenue. So really it's because of passengers booking a seat and then cancelling it after their plans change. Not just one passenger, but many.
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This has been the stock answer about overbooking since the advent of Sabre and other computerized reservation systems in the 70s. Back then the red carbon ticket was treated as legal tender, good on any airline and any flight because ticket prices were regulated. There was no penalty for making a handful of reservations, and the ticket was good no matter what.

I'm skeptical this scenario is still valid. With thousands of constantly changing fares, change and cancellation penalties, and the advent of internet search engines, I doubt the number of multiple bookings and unused reservations on any given flight is more than a few.

While in the past airlines made public the percentage of multiple bookings and their resultant defensive overbooking, those figures don't seem to be public knowledge any more.
 
A few observations from reading the thread; someone made the observation that the passenger made it to the seat so it must have been a seat check issue. Well, we have all seen the videos of people getting bumped after they were seated, it happens a lot. It was argued that the reason the airlines overbook is because of passengers cancelling. Some one else observed that when a passenger gets bumped it can cost them money in lost days at hotels/resorts/boats etc. That makes me wonder, how can these other entities get away with charging the customer, or down right disallowing cancellation, but the airlines cant? I have personally never been bumped from a flight, I only fly when absolutely necessary and if I ever do get bumped everyone will probably know it because I will be that guy. I have never witnessed, nor been personally mistreated by an FA or CSM, but that happens a lot also.

I think it is caused by a couple of things that converge, one is cheap seats make for a cheap clientele. Second is the airlines still seem to be stuck in the 60s culture wise and haven't adapted to the unwashed masses who fly now, me being one of them, I understand how they think. We expect that when an airline offers a price for a ticket that is what the seat is worth. When we pay for a ticket, we expect a seat. When someone with the airlines makes us a promise, we expect them to keep it, across the company. The passenger in this instance was promised a seat for her cello, she followed all the rules and someone down the line broke that promise. There is no explaining that away and once again, that is exactly what the airline tried to do. Just own it when you fail, most people appreciate that.
 
Fearless Tower said:
And it's culture. You can tell when some people are just unhappy in their jobs and pass on their bitterness to the people they interact with. It can be fixed. I just don't see anyone there trying to fix it.
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Well like I said, the company has their Elevate program that the working groups (other than pilots) are required to attend each year, as well as various initiatives that supposedly help empower FAs and Gate Agents to do their jobs more easily. You'll have to talk to your FA friends though, who knows how effective any of this stuff is? I actually went to Elevate this year (it blew the minds of the organizers that I was there), and yeah, it's a bunch of corporate rah rah rah BS, but it's aiming to do exactly what you're talking about. So *someone* is trying to fix it, but I'm of the opinion that the genuinely toxic FAs and gate agents aren't going to change - period.

Believe me, I have just as much skin in this game as anyone - I deal with our gate agents and FAs more than any passenger ever will, so I'd love to see the change. I just feel like there's more to it than 'the merger'.
 
Fearless Tower said:
Mark my words: Doug Parker’s next acquisition will be United. It only makes sense....
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I don't see the DOJ allowing such a thing, even under a Republican administration.
 
Fearless Tower said:
I don't think it is a legal issue. Its a culture issue.

First, the airline needs to acknowledge that there ARE culture problems related to the mergers. You have to address the culture to find ways to (1) build a common culture that seeks operational excellence while (2) identifying and addressing those employees who won't let go of their bitterness. You have to find ways to weed or sideline those people or they will continue to spread their toxicity.
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Merger integration planning should start when the purchase strategy is considered. There's a lot more to the story with the AA/US merger (including the fact that the US unions had not been fully merged when they took over AA).

I have friends at all the majors, and AA stands out as unique in this realm right now. You don't hear Delta or Southwest people trash talk their airline. Even United with all of Munoz' media foibles, people are surprisingly defensive of their airline. But their is a lot of bad blood still present in AA and its mostly the AMR people who watched their upper management follow the Toys R Us path and stick it to the employees while they packed their golden parachutes.
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I agree that AA stands out as particularly bad right now. I've also got friends at most of the carriers - unlike DL and WN, which had a long reputation for treating the employees well, AA has a long history of bad employee relations. UA isn't much better, but right now they're not suffering the same issues as AA.

I would correct one assertion: the upper management of AMR didn't have a lot of choice. Horton wanted to stay, and didn't want to take the airline into bankruptcy. Even at that, he was making progress to change things internally. Once you get into bankruptcy, you're at the mercy of the courts (and in this case, the acquiring entity which was US). Parker used to work at AA. Since they were the acquiring entity, they & the investors get to decide on the CEO. As part of the integration, they replaced most of the AMR folks with US folks. The word I get is that the headquarters is "a mess" and "full of inexperienced people". I realize how it might look to the employees, but really the AMR folks had little choice in the matter.

Under Parker, though, AA has had some major missteps. The Basic Economy product recently had to be modified because it was uncompetitive. The 737Max extra seats and restroom issues are ongoing. There is great animosity as the airline has drawn down JFK as a hub and moved a considerable amount of the AA flying to Philly (and with the unions still not merged, there is animosity between the unions because they can't bid the other group's flights out of PHL).

And problems with the new crew scheduling system haven't helped.

So a lot of this dates back decades. It has not been helped, at all, by Parker. And a lot of flyers - the ones used to the old AA service - talk about how US has hurt the airline. It's deeper than the flight attendants, it goes through-and-through to the customer experience from phone agents to ticket counter to gate agents to flight attendants. In other words, a CF.

But everyone has their own view - I think we can agree that it's a toxic environment.

Some people seem to have a hard time letting that go, but unless you address those pockets of toxicity, they present a danger of spreading to the new blood.

The other thing that might help is to train cabin crews and gate agents to work harder to defuse situations. It may or may not have been a factor in this particular case, but in too many of these social media vs airline cases, we see an FA or Gate Agent behaving poorly and no one else seems to try to step in and take over. You don't see much good cop/bad cop exchange. I think a lot of these situations could be defused or minimized by simply having another employee take over the handling of the dispute.
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Agree with all of that.
 
PaulS said:
You know, I wouldn't want that cello strapped in between me and the aisle, nope. Any idea which seats she and the cello were in? The other thing is pitch and width measurements are 2 parts of our 3d world. Cellos are long too. I wonder if there is a difference between the 37 and 67 in height above the seat cushion. Cellos don't bend at the waist.
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A standard 4/4 cello is 47.6" tall, excluding the end pin, and 17.3" wide. It seems safe to assume the case adds no more than 4" to those dimensions.

I've only seen them in window seats, with the case on the floor, and a seat belt extender used to strap the neck tight against the seat back. At 4'4" in overall height, it's not going hit the overhead as far as I can tell.
 
wsuffa said:
There is great animosity as the airline has drawn down JFK as a hub and moved a considerable amount of the AA flying to Philly (and with the unions still not merged, there is animosity between the unions because they can't bid the other group's flights out of PHL).
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I assume you mean the FAs - the pilots are completely integrated.
 
kayoh190 said:
Believe me, I have just as much skin in this game as anyone - I deal with our gate agents and FAs more than any passenger ever will, so I'd love to see the change. I just feel like there's more to it than 'the merger'.
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And you’re right. It could very well have been an America West employee having a bad day. I guess I get really frustrated seeing an airlines (America West and AA) that I personally care very much about struggle and lack harmony more than other merged airlines largely because of the way those mergers were handled. I think Parker has focused far more on growth than harmony and it shows.
 
wsuffa said:
There is great animosity as the airline has drawn down JFK as a hub and moved a considerable amount of the AA flying to Philly (and with the unions still not merged, there is animosity between the unions because they can't bid the other group's flights out of PHL).
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I’ll tell you what, PHL could be the subject of its own culture study.

I flew through PHL this weekend and was amazed by the general apathy. Didn’t matter if it was regional or mainline, it seemed like AA had no F’s left to give.

It was a night and day difference from CLT or DFW.
 
Fearless Tower said:
And you’re right. It could very well have been an America West employee having a bad day. I guess I get really frustrated seeing an airlines (America West and AA) that I personally care very much about struggle and lack harmony more than other merged airlines largely because of the way those mergers were handled. I think Parker has focused far more on growth than harmony and it shows.
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I completely understand. I'm probably a typical pilot - I get tunnel vision and see it all from the pilots' side - so when you guys start talking about culture, I went one way with it while you guys are taking the larger view. ;)
 
Someone on the crew, or someone on the ground staff had the cellist and her instrument tossed because they had a couple of friends\family who wanted the seats.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I've seen it happen.
 
Shepherd said:
Someone on the crew, or someone on the ground staff had the cellist and her instrument tossed because they had a couple of friends\family who wanted the seats.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I've seen it happen.
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You would have...what?...three bucks?

Kidding aside, if I were in charge, that individual would be fired, or punished to the maximum extent allowed by union contract. There is no room for that kind of crap, no matter who you are.
 
kayoh190 said:
I completely understand. I'm probably a typical pilot - I get tunnel vision and see it all from the pilots' side - so when you guys start talking about culture, I went one way with it while you guys are taking the larger view. ;)
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I wouldn’t call it a larger view, just a different one. Not that there are not valid points being made, but many times, people’s views are just plane wrong.

Even some of the people in some of these threads. ;)
 
Zeldman said:
The story is 30 grand for a cello.

I remember watching Larry, Curly and Moe ride down a hill on a cello....
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There’s an even older airline Cello story of the musician who flew with his the same way, bought it a seat... to go to performances. It had an estimated worth over a million dollars.

In another forum someone mentioned that he eventually gave the cello a name and got it a frequent flyer number and was using the miles to help fly the cello around until Delta caught him.

He never used the miles the cello paid for for himself and figured the cello getting to ride for free once in a while was fine, since it would if it was a human. Delta said no, frequent flyer miles are for humans only, and he decided never to fly Delta again.

So goes the story, anyway.

I used to travel with about $40-$50K in test equipment and tools back when I flew but I always checked them. Back then that wasn’t far below my annual salary.

Turned into a funny story of my boss screaming over the phone at a Hertz agent in SLC one night. See, I was younger than 25 at the time and couldn’t rent a car except that we were self-insured in Hertz’s system and self-insured companies can elect to rent to anyone legal to drive the car or 21 or something. Anyway, it’s tracked in their systems but back then it was just buried somewhere in the notes field about a corporate account. I had rented cars in every city I’d been to up until the idiot in SLC who couldn’t read the notes, said no.

My ex Navy submarine XO boss spent five minutes chewing the Hertz counter person a new one with phrases like, “You see the case he’s standing next to? We trust him with that and it’s worth double what the car is worth!”

He tried to be nice for about a minute. Then he switched over to military bark mode voice and laid into the moron. I could hear him from across the counter with the phone press to the agent’s ear.

And so... I left about ten minutes later with a rental car to head to the customer site. :)
 
I saw this.

Guess what? I am a professional cellist, and as you say, AA's excuse is quite a weak one. Actually, it is BS.

There aren't many of us, but every day there are probably 50-100 cellists traveling with our instruments. Some of us are professionals, and if we don't arrive on time for a concert, that could be it for our careers.

3393RP said:
A musician and her $30,000 cello were removed from the return leg of a round trip AA flight because her cello was ostensibly too big for the seat she had purchased for it. The cello apparently grew between the outbound and return flights, because no mention was made of the offending instrument on the outbound leg.

AA's explanation is pretty weak:

“A passenger on flight 2457 from Miami to Chicago was traveling with her cello. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication about whether the cello she was traveling with met the requirements to fit onboard the particular aircraft she was flying, a Boeing 737.

We rebooked our passenger on a flight the next morning on a larger aircraft, a Boeing 767. We provided her a hotel and meal accommodations for the inconvenience. We apologize for the misunderstanding and customer relations has reached out to her.”

I'm not an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure the seat width, seat pitch, and aisle width on AA 737s and 767s are identical. If they differ, it's not by more than an inch or two. American needs a better PR Prevaricator.

A person traveling with the musician that stayed on the full flight noted after she and the cello were removed, the two seats were taken by two apparently overbooked passengers.

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2018/...ht-after-buying-seat-for-her-30000-cello.html
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steingar said:
Not much of a story, seeing how they got her a hotel room and bought her dinner.
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Potentially a disaster. I have a concert in two weeks, and a flight for the night before. If I am kicked off and put on a flight the next day, I might miss the rehearsal or even the concert. The only other performer is my wife, and she's traveling with me.
 
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Fearless Tower said:
They likely would have had to pay for lodging for the 2 standbys rather than one. The cello is cheap.
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How cheap is a lawsuit? She was returning home, but if she had missed a performance, it would be a completely different story.
 
kayoh190 said:
I assume you mean the FAs - the pilots are completely integrated.
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Correct
Fearless Tower said:
I’ll tell you what, PHL could be the subject of its own culture study.

I flew through PHL this weekend and was amazed by the general apathy. Didn’t matter if it was regional or mainline, it seemed like AA had no F’s left to give.

It was a night and day difference from CLT or DFW.
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Yeah, PHL is much despised amongst the frequent flyers, too. Part of that is the same kind of attitude that's seen at certain Philly sporting events, and some of that is heritage dating back to the Allegheny days. PHL tends to have "don't care" employees, a horrid terminal layout, and TSA folks that have been sued for their behavior.

And that's said with apologies to my friends that are in Philly, not AA employees, and are incredibly helpful and giving. Something about the airport environment.

Having said all that, when I was coming back from BCN last month, via PHL, AA cancelled the connection from PHL to DCA and rerouted me - the next day - for PHL-LGA-DCA, I would have been on my own for a hotel room. And I would have had to deal with LGA which is in some respects even worse than PHL. No dice - I decided to take Amtrak from PHL-DCA that evening (at a fare that was cheaper than any hotel room....). I have to give kudos to the staff at PHL - from the info desk, to the ticket agents to the attendant at the SEPTA station for helping me out efficiently and expeditiously. I was on the SEPTA train to 30th Street within 10 minutes of the time the flight canceled, and that included a short stop at the ticket counter to get them to cancel the last segment of the trip (she looked at the auto-rebooked reservation, let out a breath, and said "now why would they do that" when she saw the PHL-LGA-DCA segment for the next day).

So, when you ask for help that's achievable, I found them to be helpful. On other days and routine stuff, less so.
 
3393RP said:
This has been the stock answer about overbooking since the advent of Sabre [...] There was no penalty for making a handful of reservations, and the ticket was good no matter what. I'm skeptical this scenario is still valid.
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You are 100% correct in your skepticism. It's nearly impossible today to make multiple reservations that may cause empty seats for an airline. The three major airlines allow you to cancel a reservation within 24 hours. Southwest has a more generous policy. But you can't hold onto multiple reservations for too long without incurring a non-refundable expense. Not sure how the rest play, but I can't imagine Spirit or Frontier being more considerate than Southwest.

Overbooking, in my observation, is a symptom of airlines' operating reality than capricious reservations by travelers. Specifically, airlines end up with booked but empty seats because a connecting flight is late. Surely, sometimes the passengers are late arriving at the airport of origin. Or spending too much time relaxing at the Senator Lounge in MUC because they confused departure and boarding time and barely made their flight (not me, a friend :rolleyes:). But gratuitous multiple reservations can't be the cause of empty seats that lead to the overbooking practice.
 
PaulS said:
You know, I wouldn't want that cello strapped in between me and the aisle, nope. Any idea which seats she and the cello were in? The other thing is pitch and width measurements are 2 parts of our 3d world. Cellos are long too. I wonder if there is a difference between the 37 and 67 in height above the seat cushion. Cellos don't bend at the waist.
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The cello goes in a window seat.
 
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