I wrote earlier about a doctor who was dragged off a United Express flight last night when the airline needed to transport crew instead of four passengers. He needed to get to work at a hospital the next day. United, though, needed crew in place in Louisville.
In this case it doesn’t appear that United sold more tickets than seats, rather they discovered for operational reasons they couldn’t carry as many passengers as expected. They needed to position crew at the flight’s destination.
Credit: @Tyler_Bridges
What I wanted to explore here, though, is a comment from reader neversink,
You buy a ticket. You should be guaranteed a seat. Overbooking should be illegal. And if the airline wants people to leave, they should up the ante to the market rate until someone takes the offer. Whatever it takes. Even if it takes $20,000 to get someone off the plane. The airlines play this game at the passengers inconvenience. It’s time the airlines were inconvenienced.
Why Airlines Overbook
While there wasn’t an oversale in this situation, most airlines in North America will sell more seats than they can carry passengers. They use historical information to determine how many passengers are likely not to show up for a flight. They want each seat to go out with a passenger in it.
Maybe they figure passengers are likely to oversleep a Sunday morning flight out of Las Vegas, so they can transport home those passengers that do make it to the plane. Passengers that oversleep expect to stand by on a later flight (either free or for a fee). Either way, an empty airline seat is a spoiling resource.
Airlines are pretty good at guessing these things, taking data like when the flight is and how far in advance tickets were purchased. And indeed they’re getting better, the rate of denied boardings has been on the decline over the past two decades. (In 2000, 0.21% of passengers were denied boarding (voluntary and involuntary) by the largest US airlines. In 2015, 0.09% were.)
You might think airlines shouldn’t overbook, sell each seat one time. But if that were the case airlines wouldn’t really be able to allow passengers the freedom to switch flights at will either on refundable tickets or merely by paying a change fee. Show up 15 minutes late for the airport, buy a new ticket.
What Does it Even Mean Not to Overbook?
If an airline sells exactly the number of seats they have on a plane, they still may not be able to accommodate everyone. Sometimes weather requires the plane to take on more fuel, and so they have carry fewer passengers (weight and balance issues can even affect a widebody aircraft).
And the number of seats on a plane itself can seem somewhat arbitrary. American Airlines has more seats on a Boeing 777 than Cathay Pacific does, so American is more likely to be unable to carry as many passengers as the plane has seats on Los Angeles – Hong Kong than Cathay is.
Is American overbooking by selling each seat on their plane, knowing that sometimes heavy winds on the long flight could cause challenges?
If Airlines Couldn’t Overbook, Had to Sell Fewer Seats, Prices Would Be Higher
You may not like the idea of overbooking, but denied boardings are rare. And the flexibility to do it means that the airline has more seats to sell.
Ban overbooking and that’s fewer seats being sold. That means higher costs per passenger (since you’re spreading the costs over fewer ticket sales). And quite simply, holding demand for seats constant reducing the quantity of seats supplied raises their price.
But Shouldn’t Airlines Spend More Time Seeking Volunteers?
It often seems that airlines should work harder to find volunteers to take a bump in exchange for compensation, instead of involuntarily denying boarding to passengers who have to get where they’re going. Maybe the airline only offered $200 or $400 in vouchers, why not $600 or $800 in cash especially when they’ll be on the hook to pay out to passengers involuntarily bumped. Should the airline here have been forced to keep upping the ante to $2000 or $5000?
Except that the time spent doing this might cause even bigger problems. Or at least it’s reasonable for the airline to think ex ante that it might.
- Delaying a flight even a little could cause crew to time out and the whole flight to cancel
- Government may have given the plane a very specific takeoff time (air traffic control) and if they miss their window the flight could be substantially delayed or even cancelled
- A late flight might cause passengers to misconnect with their next flight and be stranded
- And late arriving crew would delay other flights
- Or crew might be required to sleep in the next day to meet legal minimum rest requirements
There are No Guarantees in Air Travel
JetBlue doesn’t overbook their flights but saw a big spike in involuntary denied boardings. It turns out they had to substitute small aircraft on a number of occasions, which had fewer seats than the original planes.
Weather cancels flights. Mechanical issues cancel flights. Airline IT meltdowns cancel flights.
A friend had her Delta flights cancelled three days in a row last week (on day two we got her a United flight using miles that Delta had said was unavailable, no time to argue over a rebooking).
Sometimes flights are delayed and you don’t make your connection, and sometimes those connections are the last flight of the day — or even the week.
Air travel is complicated, and subject to the whims of mother nature, the skills of the airline, and the vagaries of chance.
Unfortunately you have to roll with it, and if you really really need to be somewhere you need to build in a cushion (something my friend on Delta did, flying to Los Angeles a day and a half early, but with Delta’s operational problems this last week and their personnel and IT failures it simply still wouldn’t have been enough).
What Should the Doctor Have Done? And How Should United Have Reacted?
In this case the flight was delayed, and the situation went bad. It’s reasonable for an outside observer to think the police should have found a less confrontational way to work with the passengers who were ordered to get off the plane than to drag them off and bloody them!
In fact that’s my hunch, fully realizing that we only have seen video of what happened once the man was being dragged off and not what happened leading up to that.
However when an airline orders you off the plane, you need to follow instructions even if it sucks. You could face criminal charges for failing to do so. You could wind up in Guantanamo and frankly no one wants to be water boarded…
If the passenger had gotten off the plane, they still could have made it to the hospital the next day albeit more worse for wear. There was a later Chicago – Louisville flight on United — and also on American (if they’d hurried) — although it’s not clear United would have put them on it. It would have been a 4.5 hour drive but a rental car is possible. It would have been ~ $300 with UberX. These options are all bad but it’s better than being dragged off by cops and bloodied.
Sometimes there are no good options so you look for the least bad. That’s basically never confronting crew and then confronting police. Confrontations with police can end badly not in an airport. In an airport the stakes are even greater, and this situation could have become worse than it did.
While the police probably could and should have done better, in some sense the man got lucky.
Police brutality in this case was not a proportionate response to this mans actions.
This is a really depressing article, totally missing the point and totally lacking in compassion and common sense. Having read and enjoyed your blog for a long time I am now unsubscribing.
Gary did United give you a free boarding pass for your piece of sh*t article. Next time when you need to fly home to make it to your child’s birth, I hope they beat you over the head with a billy club and drag you out so one of their employee can have your seat…maybe then you will learn to empathize for your fellow mankind.
Here the far side of a truth, you cannot fly if they do not want you on their plane, BUT:
1. if you state options for the passenger such as a 3 hour uber ride why didn’t the crew consider getting the uber to get to their destination whereas after a 2 hour delay and another 1.5 hour of flight time, arriving at least 30 minutes later than by Uber. So its not a matter of federal regulations, its purely for the convenience of the United crew.
2. As far as racism, its not that the man was an Asian, it just so happened that they picked a rather placid, non-violent person, rather than a huge muscle bound athlete or a SWAT chief instructor, so its not racism, its called predator psychology, and the luck of the draw.
3. If you ride a taxi and the driver stopped and wanted you off, you get off, or he will drive to the nearest station house and you get off. Then you go see Judge Judy.
Here’s the far side of a truth, you cannot fly if they do not want you on their plane, BUT:
1. if you state options for the passenger such as a 3 hour uber ride why didn’t the crew consider getting the uber to get to their destination whereas after a 2 hour delay and another 1.5 hour of flight time, arriving at least 30 minutes later than by Uber. So its not a matter of federal regulations, its purely for the convenience of the United crew.
2. As far as racism, its not that the man was an Asian, it just so happened that they picked a rather placid, non-violent person, rather than a huge muscle bound athlete or a SWAT chief instructor, so its not racism, its called predator psychology, and the luck of the draw.
3. If you ride a taxi and the driver stopped and wanted you off, you get off, or he will drive to the nearest station house and you get off. Then you go see Judge Judy.
You’re really unbelievable. Maybe, how ’bout this…get some other flight crew in Louisville in place from elsewhere…or get a private plane to fly those special snowflake flight crew that needed to work to where they needed to go. I mean, if you’re legally supposed to shell out up to $1300 USD for each passenger you have to displace–that’s a total of $5200 USD so I’m sure they could have gotten a good ole’ Cesna to fly those crew members to where they needed to go. Or send them in a car. Or do anything else except brutalize people so that it’s not ‘inconvenient’ for the people who work for your company. With your logic, the captain of a boat that’s going down should get in the first life raft and sail off into the sunset and let the other people drown. I hope United gets sued and I hope there is a massive boycott of this terrible airline (I stopped flying with them 5 years ago due to their notorious ways which hadn’t gotten quite as bad as they are now). Sad world that we live in if one could ‘end up in Guatanemo Bay’ (as you wrote) for refusing to be treated like trash. And it’s people like you who will keep flying with United and continue to support this airline that will keep it in business. I really hope the outcry is so great that it puts United out of business. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
i hope you got well compensated for writing this well written article.
(by United)
Finally, a voice of reason! Denied boarding is a fact of life. Deal with it, people. This guy broke the law by refusing to comply with flight crew instructions. He should be arrested and charged.
And I’ll bet he’s not really a doctor, because no doctor I know would act that way.
This is unbelievable in other decent countries.
Rational profit maximization like this?
If you overbook for higher profit, then you should take the risk and the cost.
The airline had a wrong prediction, then pay for the mistake, instead of kicking passengers off the plane for the seats of your own employees!
No wonder U.S. airlines get such low worldwide rankings!
Your article is entirely undercut by your claim their wasn’t “time” to offer more compensation.
Instead of dithering around offering 400 or 800 dollars (and you know they never hurry to jump between steps) they could have – along with assistance in rebooking and accoms if needed – started with 1000 cash, 60 seconds later gone to 2000, 60 seconds later gone to 4000, 60 seconds later gone to 6000.
There is no way in hell they wouldn’t have got their 4 volunteers in a three minutes if they’d offered that much. They would have saved time over first going through their pitiful call for volunteers, and then explaining to each of the four people thrown off why they needed to vacate.
So even if we accept your claim such brutality is justified in this case, it could have been avoided by spending more money without burning more time.
This is unbelievable in other decent countries.
Rational profit maximization like this?
If you overbook for higher profit, then you should take the risk and the cost.
The airline had a wrong prediction, then pay for the mistake, instead of kicking passengers off the plane for the seats of your own employees!
No wonder UA get such a low worldwide ranking!
UA 69th worldwide
http://www.worldairlineawards.com/Awards/world_airline_rating.html
Got a strong feeling that you wrote all these articles to defend United. Shame On You, Gary!
You’re just wrong here. There is no excuse for what happened to this passenger and this is 100% victim-blaming.
United had the discretion to up the ante in looking for voluntary bumps from $800 to $1350.
United had the discretion to find a more willing involuntary bump rather than escalate the situation with a passenger who did not want to deplane.
United had the discretion to send their non-rev crew to Louisville via Uber, rental car, that later flight that you think existed, etc.
Instead, United decided to call the cops and to forcibly remove him from their aircraft. They knew he didn’t want to go — what made them think he’d do so peaceably? While the action of one officer — hitting the passenger and knocking him unconscious and bloodying him — was not typical, it certainly was foreseeable.
Nothing in how United handled this is appropriate. The victim made one mistake; United made many. United is justly getting roasted over this disaster.
This sounds like this airline is disorganized. That they need remove customers for their staff really shows how bad airlines are to their customers. I won’t fly Delta after seeing this
You know what’s also disgusting? Gary Leff capitalizing on this terrible incident by posting provocative article after provocative article. Why?
Why do you think?
Clickety-click-clickbait. All he cares about are getting his blog numbers up.
You Sir, are a despicable human being. Shame on you.
United has already lost in the court of public opinion, with all these videos out there & the appalled passengers who were on the flight. People now are scared to fly United, because they don’t want this to happen to them or their family members. Even if they chose to comply, nobody, but nobody wants to be told that they have been chosen by a computer to leave a flight that they are sitting on, with their stuff in the overhead bins and their luggage already on board. And worst of all for United, people are not typically treated this way on other airlines.
The ONLY Way to regain a percentage of the customers United has lost, is to come down hard on this: condemn what happened; state this is not their policy; reassure everyone that this would never happen again on a United flight; fire anyone involved, including higher level executives who came up with this policy. Accept full responsibility and fully apologize, something that the CEO is not capable of doing in his callous & inadequate response, so he needs to resign or be fired also. Because someone at United made this terrible decision that resulted in this man being assaulted, United will be paying dearly to this passenger and his family, and I am sure there will be lawsuits from the passengers who were traumatized from watching this. Not to mention there were a bunch of high school students, whose parents are probably irate and also considering lawsuits. Worst of all for United, they will lose money from all the customers they will be losing. I used to happily support United airlines, for several decades now. Unless the above happens, I am more than willing to pay an additional $100-$150 per ticket to fly on a different airline. $200-300 is a small price to pay to make sure my head doesn’t get bashed in by United, or that I don’t have to watch someone else’s head get bashed in…!
What i see here is a typical Caucasian arrogance to apurely racist crime. He was the only Asian on the flight. If I were the person’s lawyer I would go to the top with “Command Responsibility”. Anyway lets see where the suits go in this case.
wonder whether the author was paid for this drivel!!
what Gary Leff is advocating is putting the priority of profits over rational and empathetic and civil treatment … he doesn’t deserve to write a column here … stay away from this clickbait
You suggest that the doctor should drive for 4.5 hours and then start work at the hospital? If I were a patient at that hospital, I’d much prefer to be treated by a well-rested doctor. The airline employees could have driven or been driven and saved the company money and everyone a lot of unnecessary grief.
Hope United and the police Beat you up next so we can see you apologizing to them.
So if the paying customers had alternatives surely that means the staff had those alternatives too and therefore no need to this utter shambles? Crew discomfort MAY put passengers lives at risk however doing so to a surgeon 100% will put patients lives at risk
On the side note, Is there a law for a hosoital to bump a patient while inside the theater ready for a procedure just because the hospital is fully occupied and not having enough doctors. Talking about karma
what a pile of shit Gary Leff.
your an asshole.
they only offered him a 3PM flight the next day. United flight was not overbooked – united just chose to put their crew as more important. why didn’t united find another carrier for their team?
you don’t beat up your customers….literally
You are 100% wrong. This is absolutely illegal and is not a case of denied boarding so is not covered under those regulations. This was forcible removal from an aircraft. From a lawyer on another blog:
“This myth that passengers don’t have rights needs to go away, ASAP. You are dead wrong when saying that United legally kicked him off the plane.
First of all, it’s airline spin to call this an overbooking. The statutory provision granting them the ability to deny boarding is about “OVERSALES”, specifically defines as booking more reserved confirmed seats than there are available. This is not what happened. They did not overbook the flight; they had a fully booked flight, and not only did everyone already have a reserved confirmed seat, they were all sitting in them. The law allowing them to denying boarding in the event of an oversale does not apply.
Even if it did apply, the law is unambiguously clear that airlines have to give preference to everyone with reserved confirmed seats when choosing to involuntarily deny boarding. They have to always choose the solution that will affect the least amount of reserved confirmed seats. This rule is straightforward, and United makes very clear in their own contract of carriage that employees of their own or of other carriers may be denied boarding without compensation because they do not have reserved confirmed seats. On its face, it’s clear that what they did was illegal– they gave preference to their employees over people who had reserved confirmed seats, in violation of 14 CFR 250.2a.
Furthermore, even if you try and twist this into a legal application of 250.2a and say that United had the right to deny him boarding in the event of an overbooking; they did NOT have the right to kick him off the plane. Their contract of carriage highlights there is a complete difference in rights after you’ve boarded and sat on the plane, and Rule 21 goes over the specific scenarios where you could get kicked off. NONE of them apply here. He did absolutely nothing wrong and shouldn’t have been targeted. He’s going to leave with a hefty settlement after this fiasco. “
The only thing you got right in this lousy article is that the airline should have tried harder.
Think you should report what happened before video.
This is a ridiculous article. Your whole point of “the airline didn’t have time” is totally baseless and pathetic. Why didn’t they seek volunteers at the gate, as any experienced crew would do, instead of forcibly dragging someone out like a pig when everyone was seated? If one is not willing to do so, try ask someone else, and you don’t need too much time if you are willing to pike up your compensation at the very beginning. Why didn’t they just offer your Uber ride suggestion to their own crews? No wonder why the US airlines’ customer service are always ranked so low globally, whoever handled this situation needs to be fired, and whoever wrote this article lacks a mere sense of apathy towards mankind.
Let’s leave racism out of the conversation. There were 3 others selected that were white so get your greedy litigious minds to focus on how United had treated a paying customer incorrectly!!
This stupid baught-off author is out of his mind. What he would say if the one who was beaten on that UA flight was him or his family member?! The ridiculousness of this article is beyond anybody’s imagination.
DOCTOR? WHAT DOCTOR? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4HccDTbPLOnVmRSTGpBcWN4dzA/view
This article is so nonsensical I don’t know where to start. Let’s boil it down and simplify it.
1) Passenger buys ticket. Airline gets money.
2) If passenger misses flight and wants to go standby, Airline still has the
money. The seat said passenger gets by going standby was not sold
to begin with so Airline does not lose money.
3) If passenger cannot get on standby because all seats were sold said
passenger will have to wait or by a new ticket. THIS HAPPENS ALL
the time!
In eve SIMPLER TERMS, let’s say Gary leases a car but then said car is taken back by the dealer because they over leased a number of cars they had in their inventory. Would Gary think this was fair? But WAIT – it’s not another customer who wants the car, it’s someone from the dealership who needs it for a family member!
Gary?
I’m generally amenable to your analysis here. However- though this wasn’t a simple oversold flight, United most definitely screwed up. Either- the crew they wanted to deadhead on the plane was not properly scheduled, meaning United screwed up with scheduling, or some other factor after scheduling out the crew in that difficult position. Either way, United screwed up- in the first scenario, their mistake was failing to properly schedule, combined a second mistake of ejecting passengers from an already-boarded craft; in the second, if the cause of the crew schedule problem is assumed as an act of God, then their mistake is how they responded: forcibly ejecting passengers from an already-boarded craft.
No matter what scenario you assume occurred, the real mistake wasn’t overselling- it was their response to needing a crew to be somewhere else. In the same way we can’t blame overselling here, we can’t blame the passenger for his response to being told to leave.
You need to recognize the real error in judgement that United made here. It’s sad, but likely, that government intervention and involvement with airline regulations contributed to this piss-poor outcome as well.
On a side note- why not open up the market for customers inconvenienced by airlines to bid for recompense? Seems to me that in a free market, where government doesn’t in effect “deputize” carriers with a quasi-monopoly on force, the voluntarily created contract between customer (passenger) and business (airline) would be open to renegotiation if one end of the agreement attempts to reneg (airline). But that’s my two cents.
So they book 105 people for a flight that holds 100. They sell tickets to 105 people and collect money from 105 people knowing that they only have 100 seats. Nice racket if you can get away with it. THEN, it is the public’s fault if everyone shows up.
This was not even the case. If you bounce people off a flight for “employees” then you really need to compensate. Ridiculous and pandering article!
@IJ Winfrey but that’s not even what happened.
What the actual fuck Gary. Overbooking is a way of compensating for the vagaries of air travel, I get that – but that in NO WAY JUSTIFIES United beating the shit out of a paying passenger.
They should have denied boarding at the gate and offered compensation, and given that they failed to do this they should have upped the compensation until somebody took it voluntarily. It would have been a damn sight cheaper than the bad publicity is going to cost them, and the way this is going (and growing) online, United may have inadvertently solved their overbooking problem for good – by having no paying passengers left.
Are you seriously trying to smear this man by showing he is a medical resident, who always are referred to as doctors? This makes his claim he had to be at work even more credible. Someone needs to investigate you to find out how far Untied is going to go with this smear. Their handling of the matter has already forfeited the entire value of the airline in PR damage. Munoz is now the walking dead, United flying dead to hundreds of millions of customers who won’t even buy the desperate Going Out of Business fares.
United airlines SUCKS… period.
Gary… go suck and choke on your damn PEPSI commercial bullshit.
The author of this blog should get a beating from the police for writing this claptrap.
Here are a few basic facts.
1. Airlines overbook all the time. ALL airlines.
2. When more passengers show up than there are seats, the airlines have to reduce the number of passengers.
3. They usually do this by offering compensation. They usually start with a voucher for a future flight and/or money. If a passenger is a chump, they will accept the offer and volunteer to be bumped. If they refuse the offer and the airline bumps them anyway, then the airline is on the hook to pay them cash money and refund the cost of their ticket.
4. If involuntarily bumping the passenger causes a delay of up to one hour, the airline must pay the passenger 200% of the cost of his ticket. If the delay is two or more hours, they must pay 400% of the cost of the ticket up to $1,350 plus refunding them the cost of their ticket. They may also be on the hook for a hotel room and food. This is the LAW.
5. United offered volunteers $400-$800 in vouchers for future flights (NOT CASH).
6. Commenter SNorth, above, pointed out that this is not really a legitimate case of bumping a passenger on an overbooked flight. The flight was NOT overbooked. It was fully booked. Every seat was paid for and every passenger had a seat. Bumping a passenger is done BEFORE boarding. Once the passengers are in the seat, the rules change and the law cited by the airline no longer applies.
If passengers do not volunteer, then the airlines is on the hook for the cash anyway. Why not offer the cash and a refund before they go to the extreme of roughing up one of their paying passengers? Even the legal limit of $1,350 does not constrain the airline. They are free to offer more. They could have offered $2,00 or $4,000 in cash. That would be a lot cheaper than hiring a PR firm to handle this mess.
Then there is the lie about “randomly” picking four passengers to be bumped. They did NOT randomly pick the doctor. They looked at the roster and then exempted all First/Business Class passengers. Then they exempted frequent fliers and full fare passengers. That left them with a small pool of budget fare passengers. It was from this small pool that the “random” selection was made.
The other possible remedies were to hire a car to drive the last minute flight crew to their destination. They could even sleep on the drive. Or book them on a carrier with which United has a reciprocity agreement.
This was a complete comedy of errors. Except there was NOTHING funny about it. A doctor was brutalized and the whole world knows about it (thank you iPhone). This confrontation should have been avoided at all costs. Especially after the debacle of last week and the 10 year old girls wearing leggings.
C J above, that is very white of u to say that beating up a Chinese man on a plane is not racist. But u know it all. Hate it when white people excuse racist acts. Yes, I assume u r white and know zero about racism except for overlooking and excusing it which is what racists do
I hope an “unavoidable” kick in the dick finds it’s way to you very soon. Arguing that physical violence is needed to rectify United’s screw up is the most insane thing I have ever read. Also, under United’s own terms of contract, once he boarded the plane United agreed to carry him to his destination. The man did nothing wrong until United tried to remove him from the flight. In summary, eat shit
How much did United pay you for this piece of shit article? Infact don’t say. What did they up your mileage status? Again – don’t say. This is garbage. If the point of this article was to inform flyers how to save themselves from a blood face on an upcoming United flight l, you’ve failed miserably.
You are justifiying criminal action taken by a men who are suppose to uphold the law. Let us know when your dad, wife, mom or child have been dragged off an airline in blood. This blog post is an embarrasment. You ought to be ashamed of yourself and have some dignity.
All you complainers who don’t have a clue about how the airline industry runs in this country should just go fly another airline until the same thing happens to you on that airline. The “good doctor” was wrong when he did not comply with the directives of the airline personnel and with the directives of the airport police. Your civil rights do not transfer onboard the aircraft. You must comply with the directives of the crew. It’s pretty simple….if you don’t like it then don’t fly! Flying is not a right and the chances of you losing your seat in an overbook situation is directly related to how cheap your ticket was in relation to the other passengers. If you decide to no longer fly on United, that’s fine. That’s what capitalism is all about. You have choices. By the way, United will do fine without your business. The planes are full and people are clamoring to get onboard, just go to any airport today and you will see what I mean.
…sez Mike the fat bully bozo as CNBC announced United lost 1 billion in stock value today..
Thanks, Greg. Your reference to me as a “fat bully bozo” really says all I need to know about you. I stand by the facts in my post and when you have some concrete facts to add to the conversation, then I will be glad to read them. By the way, stocks rise and fall every day. Look at Tesla, now the most valuable auto company in the world. I hope they stay there because I am a big Tesla fan, BTW. Cheers!
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/chicago-united-lambasted-man-dragged-off-plane-46724398
Man removed from jet is Kentucky doctor with criminal record
The assurance that security responded appropriately since we didn’t see what happened before the video does not take into account that the people watching getting the full scene did not find this reasonable hence the recording of it. The eyewitness were appalled. The airline community should be appalled, and not condoning this. This as ALL involuntary removals that happen for reasons beyond patron behavior (drunk, belligerent, etc) are the airlines fault, and patrons should be treated like royalty from start to finish. The CEOs response was shameful.