United Airlines customer service

ElPaso Pilot said:
"CPD told reporters the man "fell" on his face and injured himself. CPD issued a statement on Monday, described the passenger as "irate," and said aviation security officers "attempted to carry" the man off the plane "when he fell."
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Ohhhhhhhh... this is so classic... can't say I have never heard this before...
 
SoonerAviator said:
Right, what I meant to say, was that they aren't a government entity and can do as they see fit.
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Really? So, you don't think that the airline industry is regulated by, you know, laws and stuff? DOT comes to mind. PBOR?
 
The ruckus is about UAL wanting to put some of their employees on their flight.... And I get it that as a "non-rev" thing, the cost to the company should have been minimal.

But why not book them on one of the other airlines operating between the two cities?

Were there any maintenance or repositioning flights needing to happen that could have ferried the employees?
 
abqtj said:
THIS is what many here are overlooking when bringing up the "rules" of how and when someone can get bumped. It was poor form on United's part to add 4 employees to a full flight and kick off paying passengers.
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Well, I'm sure they were looking at the revenue lost for not having a flight crew for the next morning and thought it'd be a lot cheaper to pay some vouchers instead of cancelling an entire flight. I'm sure they weren't counting on the good Doc to raise all hell about it. Hindsight 20/20 and all.
 
James_Dean said:
Really? So, you don't think that the airline industry is regulated by, you know, laws and stuff? DOT comes to mind. PBOR?
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Sure it is, just like we're all subject to laws and regulations. It doesn't mean you can't act to the contrary and suffer the consequences.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Well, I'm sure they were looking at the revenue lost for not having a flight crew for the next morning and thought it'd be a lot cheaper to pay some vouchers instead of cancelling an entire flight. I'm sure they weren't counting on the good Doc to raise all hell about it. Hindsight 20/20 and all.
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Wasn't flight crew from what I read, they were mechanics (which really doesn't make sense to me, but I don't know).
 
Ventucky Red said:
By next week this will be yesterday's fish... People have very short memories these days..
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Legal council will keep this in front of United for awhile I think. Breach of contract will carry a penalty which United will pay.
 
abqtj said:
Wasn't flight crew from what I read, they were mechanics (which really doesn't make sense to me, but I don't know).
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In that case it's incredibly stupid of UAL to do so, but the report I read initially said it was flight crew that needed to be relocated.
 
I am trying to figure out if "denied boarding" means what it appears to mean in plain English, or if it's a legal term that encompasses deplaning a passenger that's already boarded.

According to this article, it's the latter: "Most airlines avoid having to yank someone who has already settled in to their seat. Technically, that is still considered a "denied boarding" as long as the plane is still at the gate and is permissible under the law."
 
If this guy were my doctor, I would be wondering if I still trusted his judgment enough to continue being his patient at this point.
 
dmspilot said:
I am trying to figure out if "denied boarding" means what it appears to mean in plain English, or if it's a legal term that encompasses deplaning a passenger that's already boarded.

According to this article, it's the latter: "Most airlines avoid having to yank someone who has already settled in to their seat. Technically, that is still considered a "denied boarding" as long as the plane is still at the gate and is permissible under the law."
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I am not enviable of the attorney who must make that argument based on United's Contract of Carriage. Rule 21 provides that United can remove passengers from planes under certain circumstances, which do not include oversold flights. Rule 25 provides that a passenger can be "denied boarding" on account of a flight being oversold.
 
dmspilot said:
I am trying to figure out if "denied boarding" means what it appears to mean in plain English, or if it's a legal term that encompasses deplaning a passenger that's already boarded.

According to this article, it's the latter: "Most airlines avoid having to yank someone who has already settled in to their seat. Technically, that is still considered a "denied boarding" as long as the plane is still at the gate and is permissible under the law."
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Definitely something I thought about when the CoC was first brought up. It'd be up to the lawyers/legal system to determine what constituted "boarding".
 
United ranks just below Iran Air on my list of airlines to fly.
 
Years ago, I was told to get off a United flight when I was already seated. But I didn't throw a temper tantrum.

There were two of us who had been given identical boarding passes for the same seat on the same flight. An inexplicable foul-up.

I was already seated when the other passenger boarded, and he alerted a flight attendant. Upon inspection of our boarding passes, she decided I was the one who must leave, so I got up quietly and left. I then politely asked a gate agent for a boarding pass for another flight, and compensation for being bumped. A $100 voucher was presented to me, grudgingly.

For this guy, throwing a temper tantrum is going to result in a much better reward than my $100 voucher.
 
NoHeat said:
Years ago, I was told to get off a United flight when I was already seated. But I didn't throw a temper tantrum.

There were two of us who had been given identical boarding passes for the same seat on the same flight. An inexplicable foul-up.

I was already seated when the other passenger boarded, and he alerted a flight attendant. Upon inspection of our boarding passes, she decided I was the one who must leave, so I got up quietly and left. I then politely asked a gate agent for a boarding pass for another flight, and compensation for being bumped. A $100 voucher was presented to me, grudgingly.

For this guy, throwing a temper tantrum is going to result in a much better reward than my $100 voucher.
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You lost your leverage once you got off the plane...as simple as that.
 
Crew tells you to get off, you get off. Crew tells you that they're CALLING THE POLICE, you get off NOW. It's a private company; it's their airplane. They can tell you get out for pretty much any reason. You can sue them later for damages, but you simply cannot just sit there. Just because you paid for the seat, you do not have a _right_ to it. You engaged in a revocable contract, and United can choose to revoke the contract and refund your ticket price. Lousy service? Yes, but legal. Police solve problems with force. That's the only tool they have; they're not negotiators and diplomats.

United doesn't care about this. At all. That's not the CEO's response; that's the social media person who works for the PR person who reports to the VP who reports to the EVP who reports to the CEO whose assistant told the EVP to "say something that sounds good and doesn't implicate any wrongdoing on our part; Oscar won't be back from golf until tomorrow." The CEO is worried about the next round of union negotiations and what's happening to his fuel hedges with Citigroup. If he can squeeze an extra basis point out of his fuel swap with head of commodities at Citigroup over golf this afternoon, that'll save his company ten million dollars.

Maybe someone somewhere will run the math and figure out that the PR and legal costs of this incident outweighed the cost of a charter for the crew by a factor of 10x, but they would have needed to hire high-quality people who have good judgment to run customer service to be able to figure out that kind of solution at the time. The amount of money they save by hiring low-quality staff who get snippy and call the cops outweighs the economic hit of this situation by a thousand times. Sucks, but that's reality.

It's the same reason for situations like American 1348. Sure, if AA had hired competent people, there's no way in the world an airplane would sit on an apron for nine hours. But the savings from hiring low-quality staff and binding them with rigid rules outweigh the occasional big expense when things go south. And, interestingly, that situation was only resolved when the pilot (one of the very few positions at an airline that pays a decent wage and hires "thinking people") finally just overrode the AA staff that ordered him to continue waiting and worked directly with the airport to get his passengers off. As far as AA is concerned, the fact that a few hundred people might "never fly American again" is laughably irrelevant, and a day with bad PR for an airline is a day that ends in "y". The only reason the tarmac delays have gone down is because of some legislation that made the penalty high enough to justify hiring people to fix the problem.
 
AggieMike88 said:
The ruckus is about UAL wanting to put some of their employees on their flight.... And I get it that as a "non-rev" thing, the cost to the company should have been minimal.

But why not book them on one of the other airlines operating between the two cities?

Were there any maintenance or repositioning flights needing to happen that could have ferried the employees?
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I believe that AA is the only other carrier that operates non-stop from ORD-SDF. UA may still have an agreement with AA. DL canceled the interline booking arrangements some time ago (DL would require a connection at either CVG or DTW).

WN has a late flight from MDF-SDF. But they don't do agreements - AA would need to buy the ticket and get folks to MDW.

My guess is that the AA flights were similarly fully booked or over booked given that it was Sunday afternoon/evening.

Plenty of blame to go around, but as I noted before, UA won't care unless or until their stock price drops. Public perception doesn't matter until it hits profits.
 
Tummler said:
Rule 5 provides the following with respect to oversold flights:

"G. All of UA’s flights are subject to overbooking which could result in UA’s inability to provide previously confirmed reserved space for a given flight or for the class of service reserved. In that event, UA’s obligation to the Passenger is governed by Rule 25."

Rule 25, in turn, provides that passengers on oversold flights may be "denied boarding." It does not provide that United may remove a passenger from an oversold flight to make room for other passengers, nor can the phrase "denied boarding" be reasonably interpreted to encompass "remov[al] from the aircraft" since United used that phrase in Rule 21.
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You are reading it to prove a foregone conclusion. The airline in 5.g has cancelled the reservation. The passenger no longer has any right to be there. The reference to rule 25 is to explain the remedy that will be undertaken, not a discussion of the timing in which the pax can be removed.

Doesn't matter anyway. This will be settled out of court. If the pax is really a doctor he should agree not to sue the police department in return for having the charges dropped. He doesn't need a conviction on his record, their licensing is even nuttier than ours.
 
abqtj said:
THIS is what many here are overlooking when bringing up the "rules" of how and when someone can get bumped. It was poor form on United's part to add 4 employees to a full flight and kick off paying passengers.
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Yeah, well you can inconvenience 4 passengers on one flight or a plane full of passengers on another flight that had to be cancelled because there was no way to get the crew there to cover the trip. It is easy to say here that they should have been booked on another flight without understanding the logistics in doing so.

I have no way of knowing the details of this incident. But I am reasonably sure those crew members needed to be on that flight to maintain the integrity of the schedule. How the denied boarding was handled could have been handled better based on what was reported but the crew members were going regardless.
 
From what is being discussed in various news outlets, these were not police but Aviation police. Is this a division of Chicago PD? The phrase repeated is "security", not police. I can't verify this but it sounds reasonable. One of the men involved has been suspended for not following procedures and ORD has started its own investigation. The men have 5 pt stars on hats and shirts but it's not possible to see if the word Police or Sheriff is on any of the clothing.
 
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You have to wonder if someone in crew scheduling or another department at UAL screwed up so that these four employees absolutely had to be on that flight in order to be at work later. At the most basic level UAL screwed up and then needed to make up for it by screwing passengers. This is on UAL.
 
Overbook policies suck. I would be outraged, too. But my sympathy for the guy runs out as soon as security shows up to escort him off and he still refuses. You're not flying, don't make it more dramatic than it needs to be. Call your lawyers from the terminal, not from jail or the hospital... that's on him.
 
starglider said:
Crew tells you to get off, you get off. Crew tells you that they're CALLING THE POLICE, you get off NOW. It's a private company; it's their airplane. They can tell you get out for pretty much any reason. You can sue them later for damages, but you simply cannot just sit there. Just because you paid for the seat, you do not have a _right_ to it. You engaged in a revocable contract, and United can choose to revoke the contract and refund your ticket price. Lousy service? Yes, but legal. Police solve problems with force. That's the only tool they have; they're not negotiators and diplomats.
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That's something that just bewilders me in situations like this. Sure, United shouldn't have let this happen. Sure, sometimes cops are in the wrong. You have recourse- you can demand satisfaction from the company or you can file charges/sue the police officers. Later. Sitting there and refusing to comply or fighting/arguing with the police isn't going to ever lead to a winning outcome. Yet we see these videos all the time. What's wrong with these people? What else are they expecting to happen when they behave like that? I don't get it.
 
^ I get it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't suck for people getting booted from the flights they paid for. There were something like 3,000+ people who didn't volunteer but were kicked off flights last year. That sucks for each of them.
 
Out of curiosity, when they do decide to bump people do they take into consideration whether or not someone has a connecting flight and how far in advanced they booked? I was once wondering that while listening them offer money for volunteers on a flight I had to make a connection after and had booked months earlier. We made our flight, but the idea of it irritated me.

If you do miss your connection then what- what if tomorrow's flight is full? Inconveniencing someone by a day is one thing but ruining their once in a decade vacation because you overbooked is a whole other thing.
 
starglider said:
Crew tells you to get off, you get off. Crew tells you that they're CALLING THE POLICE, you get off NOW. It's a private company; it's their airplane. They can tell you get out for pretty much any reason. You can sue them later for damages, but you simply cannot just sit there. Just because you paid for the seat, you do not have a _right_ to it. You engaged in a revocable contract, and United can choose to revoke the contract and refund your ticket price. Lousy service? Yes, but legal. Police solve problems with force. That's the only tool they have; they're not negotiators and diplomats.
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While it may be legal and stated in some convoluted COC or Terms of Service that no one reads or can be expected to understand..I 100% applaud this guy for standing up and hope he gets a payday for the way it was handled. If you pay for a service there is a certain expectation that that service will be provided and the fact that the airlines can just say "nope, my employee is more important" is totally f#@ked up to the point that they called the cops due to their righteous power written in some fine print. I get overselling as I am one of those that often cancels and/or changes last second. Denying boarding ahead of time is one thing...yanking paid passengers with force to shuttle employees is another.

Too big to care.

While it may be right legally, the ends used do not make it right morally.

I personally hope United get bludgeoned in the court of public opinion on this one.
 
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murphey said:
From what is being discussed in various news outlets, these were not police but Aviation police. Is this a division of Chicago PD? The phrase repeated is "security", not police. I can't verify this but it sounds reasonable. One of the men involved has been suspended for not following procedures and ORD has started its own investigation. The men have 5 pt stars on hats and shirts but it's not possible to see if the word Police or Sheriff is on any of the clothing.
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You mean other than the word "Police" in large yellow letters on the backs of their jackets?
 
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old cfi said:
Yep, there's always another way to handle the situation. Go Delta.
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This has been my experience, I fly Delta almost exclusively now and love them. They really make the customer feel like they're number one even when things start to go from bad to worse with delays, cancellations, etc. I've had some pretty bad delays with DL, sometimes due to weather, other times mechanical, and each time they were nice, courteous, brought us free pizza and drinks, gave us vouchers, and I walked away with miles and cash towards future flights (I forget the details, but it was much more than I was expecting). Even when I've seen other pax get upset they agents were always very good about controlling and managing the situation and calming things down

The last few times I have flown with UA (which by this point was admittedly many years ago) they have made me feel unwanted, unwelcome, and made the entire travel experience extremely unpleasant... and this isn't even with delays or anything, just in the general demeanor of the crews, gate agents, etc. When we did have a delay and subsequent cancellation (due to weather) it's almost like they went out of their way to make the experience worse then it had to be

So, I go Delta if at all humanly possible, and if not I'll look at JetBlue or Alaskan as alternates
 
Someone necro this thread in 6 months with his payout.
Anyone want to guess? There was blood. Blood on the face usually garners jury favor.
 
Ventucky Red said:
Ohhhhhhhh... this is so classic... can't say I have never heard this before...
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It's amazing that people lie about these kinds of things (and probably under oath in this case) when they're surrounded by other people with cameras.

Rich
 
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