United Airlines, We put the "Hospital" in "Hospitality"!

On 4/11/2017 7:08 PM, First-Post wrote:
On Wed, 12 Apr 2017 11:43:04 +1000, Sylvia Else
wrote:

On 12/04/2017 7:51 AM, Air Gestapo wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STJQnu72Nec

Find us on http://www.facebook.com/flightorg. On the 9th April,
2017, a man was forcibly removed from United Airlines Flight
3411 in Chicago, set for Louisville. While we'd normally say
that until we have all the information, we have no information
at all, the United response tends to confirm the incident as
described by passengers. United Airlines said that ... "Flight
3411 from Chicago to Louisville was overbooked. After our team
looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the
aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to
the gate. We apologize for the overbook situation."


It's a difficult situation. If a person refusing to leave were allowed
to stay, then passengers would never comply. If force has to be used to
remove a non-compliant passenger, then that's what has to be done.

Bumping passengers in favour of its own staff looks strange, but it may
be that if those staff weren't carried, it would have knock on effects
for other flights.

To my mind, the proper solution to the overbooking problem is either to
ban it outright (given that it's deliberate, not just a mistake), or to
require that the airline just keep offering more and more money until
they do get the needed volunteers. If that means they have to offer tens
of thousands of dollars, then so be it - that's the price of overbooking.

Sylvia.

As queried in another thread, are the airlines' budgets so tight that
they are so desperate as to overbook flights just to insure that not a
single seat is empty? What kind of **** poor business model are they
using?
It hasn't been very many years back that I flew on flights that were
barely half capacity and the airlines still made their profit.
If one or two empty seats on a flight is going to put them in the red
then they need to seriously rethink how they are running their
business.

Agreed. When is the last time you took a flight that had even one empty
seat. United wouldn't have had to kick the guy off if they didn't
overbook to start with.