
Remove United from your flight results - accountnumber
http://dropunited.com/
======
hamami
While I didn't have terrible experience comparable to some recent events, I
also want to share mine. Last year when I was flying United I printed my
boarding pass from one of the kiosks at the airport, and it assigned me to a
seat where there's slightly more legroom, normally I believe these are upgrade
seats, but I assumed there's no other seats so it gave me that one. After I
and several others boarded the plane, one of the agents comes to me and wants
to see my boarding pass. At this point it's a little awkward for him to ask
for this but OK whatever, I give him my pass and he walks off with it without
saying a thing. A minute or two later he comes back and gives it back to me
and doesn't give me any explanation why he asked for it in the first place. 5
minutes later another agent comes to me and says in a rude manner I sat in
someone else's seat and asking me to leave that seat. Well guess what, the
first agent swapped my boarding pass with a different one before returning it
to me. I didn't make a big fuss about it but let them know that I knew what
they did. In fact I'd be fine if they just explained the situation and said
there's been an error with the seat assignment. They're not just violent and
inconsiderate but also very good con artists..good job losing a customer for
good..

~~~
MR4D
The only way I've found to protect against this is by being paranoid.

Whenever someone asks for my boarding pass, I show them my phone, while the
paper copy is safely in my pocket.

~~~
strictnein
I've always printed two boarding passes and kept them in my carry on. I've had
gate agents walk away with my boarding pass in the past and simply never
return.

------
rm999
The comments in here are oddly fatalist about the whole thing. We put a lot of
trust in airlines; and not just in safety or to get us somewhere, but we also
give them an unusual number of legal protections once we're in their care.

When the drama first started I kind of wrote it off: "this must have been a
misunderstanding compounded by a single employee's stupidity". But when I
found that it was not only condoned, but fully defended by the company top-
down, red flags went off. Then, the inevitable outrage led to past stories
resurfacing, with a pattern of absurd insensitivity (abused dogs, broken
guitars, sexist clothing policies, etc). Then, I started remembering some
terrible experiences I've personally had on United. Like the time they left me
stranded in India for 2 days (rumor is the staff did this on purpose to
protest some new policy around maximum flight times), then made me wait 3+
hours to get approved for a hotel room at 1 am even though I was flying
business class (which would have been wrong even if I wasn't business class!)
Or the time a gate agent lied to me about contacting a connecting flight,
leading me to miss an entire day on my Thailand trip. I have many more of
these.

My point here is that United really does seem to have ingrained issues that
directly harm their customers. This toxic culture doesn't benefit them in any
way, but if nobody cares they'll have no incentive to stop.

~~~
johnfn
> Then, the inevitable outrage led to past stories resurfacing, with a pattern
> of absurd insensitivity (abused dogs, broken guitars, sexist clothing
> policies, etc).

You don't think you'd be able to dredge up similarly bad stories for any other
airline?

Look, what United did on that flight was pretty awful. But the rest of this to
me smacks of the typical rumor mill that spins up when a company has bad PR,
which surfaces the typical sort of 2-deviations-below-the-bell-curve scenarios
you'll occasionally have when you're a company at United's scale - a scale
that employs tens of thousands of people that do not actually all act as one
giant United hive mind as much as we'd like them to but rather each as
autonomous people that can occasionally do wrong things in a way that has no
bearing on the company at large.

(That was a pretty long sentence.)

For what it's worth, I know an employee of United who loves it. But what was
that saying about the plural of anecdote again..?

~~~
jedharris
The well-informed discussion on Naked Capital
([http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-
remo...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-removal-
reporting-management-fail.html)) strongly supports the claim that the removal
was illegal. It also provides interesting evidence that the decisions were
traceable to United's attempt to reduce costs by using third party contractors
and affiliates (the flight was operated by Republic, an affiliate).

This quote is telling: "When I was a outsourced regional jet captain operating
United Express flights between 2010 and 2014 the gate agents in charge of the
regional (out-sourced) flights at United hub, Washington-Dulles, were third-
party contractors. They were horribly trained and frequently surly. The gates
were always crowded, everyone there was angry, nothing worked, it was utter
chaos and misery. I absolutely dreaded flying there and did my best to avoid
it, Chicago was only a little better."

~~~
johnfn
I'm not arguing the fact that United did a really bad thing. I definitely
agree with that.

I'm only arguing the supposition that United is a uniquely bad company.

~~~
jedharris
I'd like to know if United is a uniquely _outsourced_ airline. I think that is
quite possible and if it is, then it lends considerable weight to the
likelihood that it is a uniquely _bad_ airline.

This is the kind of problem a company can get into when the people making the
key decisions operate in terms of "metrics" that don't track reality well
enough. Plus when a lot of the work is done by outsourced vendors, they
probably don't pass on unquantifiable bad news.

~~~
ubernostrum
Compared to the other two big US airlines, yes -- United has an earned
reputation for slashing mainline service in favor of regional affiliates.
People occasionally joked (only half joking) that if previous CEO Jeff Smisek
were only legally allowed to, he'd have outsourced long-haul international
flights to 50-seat CRJs.

This also played a role in United's frankly _abysmal_ on-time ratings; in
order to have enough capacity while moving everything into tiny regional jets,
they had to raise the frequency of the flights, which led to logistical
clusterfucks at their hubs when they just overloaded the ability of the
airport operations to handle that many flights.

~~~
joezydeco
_he 'd have outsourced long-haul international flights to 50-seat CRJs..._

Smisek _did_ do it with the long-range 757s he gained in the Continental
merger. Smaller plane, less crew...and just enough range to get back if the
headwinds are light. If not, it's an unscheduled 90 minute refuel in Canada.
Add the time to clear immigration and customs, and now you have 200+ people
with a missed connection.

[http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=699955](http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=699955)

I've had it happen to me, it's not fun.

~~~
ubernostrum
United isn't the only airline which did/does use 757s on transatlantic
flights. And the fact that US east coast to western Europe was within range
for the 757 is a big reason why airlines are pushing Boeing for something else
in the same class.

Meanwhile, airlines are also looking at Airbus, which is talking up a long-
range variant of the A321neo for exactly this purpose.

------
sitepodmatt
United screwed up by not having a decent incentive system in place to avoid
deplaning people. People have presented many options, including taking a
ballpark figure on checkin, or whilst on the airplance a speaker announcement
anyone to travel later for $800, wait a minute, $1000, $1200, okay great
thanks folks.. That was extremely badly handled and shocking that no process
was in place for this - as last minute crew travel as probably quite common -
also that onboard manager laughed in someone's face when they offer to deplane
for $1600. A complete #fail at management level developing these processes.

That said, it wasn't united that removed the guy, so had American or Southwest
got to the point of needed to removing a non-co-operative passenger (it seems
that point is less likely to occur) it would probably of been the same police
team that actioned it. People need to remember that.

Also, this idea that he was targeted due to being Chinese has no supporting
evidence, its more likely it was first row of people with less/no airline
status (given the extra legroom seats in front were probably reserve for gold
members).

United screwed up on processes, gate management, and their apology. But this
was the police/airport-security that should shoulder most of blame for the
social outrage..

~~~
Mithaldu
United acted illegally from the very get-go.

Via
[https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_...](https://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/64m8lg/why_is_rvideos_just_filled_with_united_related/dg3xvja/)
and more:

> Lawyer here. 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.

> 1\. 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.

> 2\. 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.

> 3\. 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.

~~~
ams6110
IANAL but pretty sure there are some specific exceptions for employees en
route to another location to staff a flight (deadheading). If airlines could
not do this they would have to possibly cancel flights that they could not
otherwise staff, inconveniencing dozens or hundreds of passengers instead of
just a few.

That said, United utterly botched this in the way they handled it.

And I don't let the PD off the hook either. That police can use violence to
settle what is essentially a business dispute is just wrong.

~~~
chrismcb
There is nothing in the contract of carriage that says it is ok to remove a
passenger from the plane for dead heads. About the only reason they are
allowed to remove a passenger from the plane is safety reasons. Three fact
that united might have to cancel a flight and inconvenience other people is
totally irrelevant.

~~~
ams6110
You are correct and my post was not precisely worded. I was not trying to say
it was OK to forcibly remove a _boarded_ passenger for this reason.

I was responding mostly to the claim that they can only denying boarding in
the event of an oversale because they can deny boarding to accommodate
positioning crew, it happens all the time.

I agree that once the passenger was boarded, the situation was different.
United screwed up, and they compounded the problem in their violent removal of
the passenger and their subsequent public responses to the incident.

------
cloudwizard
My story about United was when I was flying from Vancouver to SFO. For some
reason, we could not land at SFO so we ended up in Oakland. I said fine. Let
me off and I will catch a cab.

They said that the plane was too big for Oakland. We sat on the runway for 2
hours then flew back to Vancouver with nothing put warm coke. By the time we
got to Vancouver, it was late so so all airport and hotel food was closed. We
had vouchers but nothing available to spend it on.

Of course they lied about the plane being too large, another airline flew the
same plane to Oakland regularly. i had to spam fax their customer support line
to get vouchers.

~~~
ww520
WTF. That's unbelievably moronic. Are there competent people in United?

~~~
lorenzorhoades
This was my same thought. I can't help but draw comparisons to Atlas Shrugged
in this whole united incident.

------
gabaix
I was once in a small crash flying United. There was no major injury, but a
lot of scare and a day of travel lost. United took good care of us, then I
receive a 'sorry, here's $50 in credit' mail. I was stunned by how small the
amount was.

A few weeks later a passenger created a Facebook group, and we all started to
share our experience. United caught wind of it, and sent us $500 credit almost
right away, with bigger apologies for the incident.

~~~
hasteur
Creating the group scared United because you didn't have any unifying
characteristic other than the event. Having people ruminate together could
have been the fermenting grounds for several (or a class action) lawsuit
against the company.

------
petilon
When you are bumped on an overbooked airline, here's what you should know:

Airlines start offering compensation and travel that is less than what is
required under the FAA rule hoping that people who haven't been properly
informed about their rights will take the cheap offer. When this doesn't work
they slowly raise the offers.

The FAA rules provide that a passenger who has a reservation and who is asked
to give up their seat because the flight is overbooked is entitled to a lot of
money and the airline is required to fill them in on their rights right away.
In writing. Compensation depends on how quickly the airline can get one to the
next place one is booked to, and can reach 400% of your paid fare or up to
$1,350 if they cannot get you to your next destination within four hours. If
they can get you somewhere you are booked to within an hour or two, the
compensation is much less.

[http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/opinions/i-got-bumped-from-
a-f...](http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/opinions/i-got-bumped-from-a-flight-
then-i-sued-opinion-stone/index.html)

~~~
aianus
> Airlines start offering compensation and travel that is less than what is
> required under the FAA rule hoping that people who haven't been properly
> informed about their rights will take the cheap offer. When this doesn't
> work they slowly raise the offers.

That's way too cynical of an interpretation. If I'm a poor, flexible traveler
(and I have been) I'd rather get $200 for myself by volunteering than have a
chance at $1350 by waiting to get kicked off.

It's win-win for me and the airline. That's 20h at minimum wage!

~~~
arcticbull
This is really the way to look at it. _Someone_ is owed some multiple of their
one-way fare as cash in hand when involuntarily denied boarding. The odds of
it being you are as low as 1 in 800.

On the other hand _you_ could have vouchers in hand, guaranteed. And at 'just'
$200 you can fly one way across the country and round trip to many places, and
the airline can save some money. I wouldn't take $200, that said I've often
taken $400+. Further, if they need multiple volunteers airlines in my
experience tend to give all volunteers the highest amount required to convince
the last guy.

------
mvpu
Incidents like this are a wake up call to process driven cultures. If the
flight crew really cared about the passenger, they would have handled it
differently. If the CEO really cared, he would have personally apologized to
the passenger and taken care of him by now. No amount of process and
regulation can build a brand as much as culture does. That's why I'm a loyal
Southwest customer. They've never let me down when it comes to common sense
and empathy.

~~~
sixothree
More than once my plane has been late on southwest and every time my
connecting flight waited for me to arrive before departing. What a nice way to
end a trip.

~~~
vinay427
Between the two clauses I honestly can't tell if you're complimenting or
criticizing the airline. In any case, I love the no-hassles baggage policy
(checking in bags is far more comfortable assuming they don't get misplaced)
and seat selection (especially when traveling alone). The easy to understand
frequent flyer program and relatively friendly staff help as well.

~~~
nyolfen
a personal anecdote about SW and lost bags -- they put my and my mother's
luggage on the wrong flight once a few years ago, and not only did they give
us both $250 in credit, they also had a courier drive the bags to her home (an
hour from the airport) the next morning. i was _very_ pleasantly surprised.

~~~
vinay427
Emirates once lost my bags on an international flight. It took numerous phone
calls with confused representatives and almost _two weeks_ to show up (after
more than half of my trip) and I didn't get any credit for my patience.
Considering this is an airline with supposedly good service on a
transcontinental flight, I'm also very pleasantly surprised by your Southwest
experience.

------
cottsak
FFS! HTTPS please! It's a browser extension. No one wants MitM extension shit
downloading onto their device.

[https://letsencrypt.org/](https://letsencrypt.org/)

[https://www.geekytidbits.com/easy-https-with-
cloudflare/](https://www.geekytidbits.com/easy-https-with-cloudflare/)

------
shas3
United has a history of being a company with a crappy culture. Basically, Uber
today is the United of the tech world and United has been the Uber of the
airlines industry for the last few decades. Stacking metaphors, even when
there were many fish in the aviation sea, United was the rotten one.

Holman Jenkins wrote an informative and funny piece in today's WSJ on this:
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-america-great-boycott-
unit...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-america-great-boycott-
united-1491951732)

~~~
arcticbull
IMO it's the ex-Continental attitude. ex-United was always very generous
throwing around compensation.

------
myrandomcomment
I do 100K miles a year on JAL. Rockstar airline. In the US go out of my way to
fly Virgin even when I have top status on One World and could fly American. I
took the American Tokyo-SF flight one as JAL was so booked. Never again. I
will stay in another day.

A co-work of mine just went to Japan for the first time and he has status on
One World. I talked him into the JAL flight. He was amazed at the difference.

America air carriers suck.

~~~
pcurve
Jal, Korean Air, asiana, ANA, all great.

~~~
mantas
I flew Asiana a loooong time ago. Still remember that flight and the fact I
took it on Asiana.

I was in economy and it was short flight but I got free tea anyway. Which is
nice, because most airlines don't offer even water. But the best part was that
it was poured from super nice decorated tea pot. Like "put it on display in
living room" nice. 10/10, would fly Asiana again.

------
sfilargi
I understand the sentiment, but if I would stop using every corp that fucked
somebody up, I would probably have to move somewhere where there is no
civilization.

~~~
petilon
If it was just that the flight attendants fucked up by calling in the cops in
a situation that didn't really call for it that would be one thing. But it was
more than that. The CEO made the situation worse by not apologizing and
instead blaming the passenger for being "disruptive and belligerent". It was
only after the stock dropped that he apologized. This shows that poor customer
service is ingrained in this corp.

~~~
nyolfen
the first statement issued by the CEO on twitter also used the truly orwellian
word choice of calling what happened "re-accommodation" (even in the context
of apologizing for it), which many people found insultingly tone-deaf passive
voice PR-speak

------
jaredsohn
It would be nice if it indicated which sites were supported within the
webstore. From looking at the manifest.json in the source, it looks like:
{Google Flights, Expedia, Kayak, Google search}

------
rpmcmurphy
I hate to be the one to point this out, but this is a case where people vote
with their wallets for the absolute cheapest product, and then are angry to
get what they paid for. They buy discounted non-refundable inflexible strings-
attached fares, and then are shocked to discover than when push comes to
shove, strings are attached (such as lowest priority on rebooking).

If you absolutely need to get there on time, or need flexibility, buy a non-
discounted fare. Yes, it costs more, but you will be at the head of the line
if there is a mechanical problem, weather cancelation, equipment replacement,
etc, all of which the airline has limited control over.

Also, a bit of perspective, the last US commercial airline accident with
fatalities was in 2009, and tens of millions of people have traveled safely to
their destination since then, not so with any other mode of transportation.

~~~
colmvp
I'm unclear how a procedure that might be illegal is related to buying a cheap
ticket. We're talking about a man who bought a ticket, legally boarded a
plane, and then was forcefully removed AFTER boarding.

The CEO remarked: The man was removed because employees were following the
“involuntary denial of boarding process.” How do you deny boarding to someone
who is already boarded?

United says its denial of boarding provisions only apply in the event of an
“oversold flight." United defines oversold flights as:

> A flight where there are more Passengers holding valid confirmed Tickets
> that check-in for the flight within the prescribed check-in time than there
> are available seats.

Employees are not considered "passengers holding valid confirmed tickets that
check-in for the flight within the prescribed check-in time." To reinforce
this reality, the CEO admitted that the flight was not oversold.

But most importantly, there are different laws for customers pre-board and
after you've board the plane. There's a very specific set of rules that allow
United to kick a boarded passenger off a plane(Rule 21 Refusal of Transport),
but there's overwhelming evidence that none of it applied to Dr. Dao.

------
rajathagasthya
So is United going to sue the guy who created this extension? Just like they
did with the guy who created a website for cheap tickets using "hidden city"
ticketing [1].

[1] - [http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/29/news/united-orbitz-sue-
skipl...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/29/news/united-orbitz-sue-
skiplagged-22/)

------
kkotak
Bottomline is most humans don't care about other humans that they don't know.
United will live on. I for one, wanted United to go out of business when they
took away my 4 yr old daughter's OPENED yogurt container (that she was eating
out of) on an international flight after realizing that we forgot to order
kid's meal for her and that they had given one to her by mistake.

------
rbcgerard
At the end of the day the problem is:

\- the service provided has become essential (airlines, cell phones, home
internet, etc)

\- it's provided relatively cheaply to a large group of people

\- there are few alternatives (and in many cases no alternatives)

\- barriers to entry are high -but profit margins are low or cyclical, or you
need scale to compete

All of this leads to customer dissatisfaction, we need the service, our
particular business doesn't matter, competitors are unlikely to enter the
space, and perversely since there are few to no alternatives as long as people
are equally dissatisfied the few players just swap customers for no real net
loss

------
anigbrowl
More of this kind of thing please. A+ for concept, execution, and
presentation.

------
partiallypro
This will have almost no effect, travel sites like Kayak, etc list United, and
guess what? United is often one of the cheapest options, so it gets the sale.
Nice concept, but it won't have an effect. What -might- have an effect on
United is that the man just so happened to be Chinese and they want to expand
into China. Otherwise, as heartless as it is to say, if United is $100
cheaper, I'm going to buy a ticket from United instead of Delta, SouthWest,
etc; as will thousands upon thousands of other people.

------
fapjacks
The last time I flew United is also the day I vowed never to fly United ever
again. A couple of months ago, I was flying out of SFO. I always bought the
priority boarding just because I get anxious when I have to wait for things.
Anyway, I was at the front of the boarding line and watched this whole thing
unfold. The United gate agents were being really short with people before
boarding began. Once boarding began, and some people were scanning their
boarding passes, the head gate agent decided that every passenger (every
single one) needed to put their carry-on into the stupid metal sizing box. But
by the time he had decided this, one of the first class passengers had already
gone onto the plane. The gate agent said "sir" half-heartedly down the hallway
to the plane, but he must have already boarded. The gate agent guy got
_extremely_ mad, started yelling about the passenger, and got on the phone and
called the airport police. Boarding had been completely stopped at that point,
and we all waited for the police to pull this first class passenger off the
plane. The guy was completely innocent, and it delayed our flight by perhaps
half an hour. It was astonishing, even after my previous pattern of waiting
four or more hours for delays on what should have been a short commuter
flight.

------
iplaw
I fly quite a bit for my business, sometimes traveling with a premium carrier
in first or business class, but equally often with low cost carriers.

Out of all airlines, United has given me the most problems. Due to my
"priority status" with most airlines, I am likely sheltered from the brunt of
the harassment, but I often witness other passengers dealing with toxic
attendants, overbooking situations, crew movement taking priority, and so on.

Emirates is my primary international carrier. However, for many of my
international trips out of DFW, United is one of the only premium carriers
available.

Truth be told, my best experiences have been with Virgin and Southwest.

Virgin is now my go-to carrier when flying longer-haul domestic between
destinations within their market. The Wright Amendment previously crippled
Southwest's usefulness but, since it's removal, I find myself flying with them
more and more often. Love Field, due to its size and location, provides such a
painless travel experience in and out of Dallas. The alternative is flying via
DFW, which necessarily adds over an hour of traffic delay each direction and
maybe half an hour of TSA delay, even with pre-approval, when compared to Love
Field. Saving 2.5 hours each time I fly is quite the value proposition.

Given these United revelations, for international flights, I will try to book
with other carriers more often - Luftahansa, Japan Airlines, Korean Air, Qatar
Airways, AeroMexico, etc.

TL;DR: United truly is the worst. Virgin and Southwest are good. Use Emirates
for international.

------
ram_rar
If I keep dropping airlines for every unpleasant experience, I ll run out of
options for flying. I have had bad experiences (not of this magnitude) , but
dropping UA from my search list is not a viable option. Its an airline, not a
restaurant. Having said that, I do hope UA bleeds through its nose while
settlement.

~~~
abecedarius
I've eschewed United for years after a bad experience of my own. Perfectly
viable; I usually take SW or JetBlue.

~~~
product50
I am assuming you are not in SF. SF is United's hub - you really lose out on a
number of conveniently timed direct flights (which many cases are also
cheapest) if you just chose to drop United from your consideration.

~~~
jballanc
JetBlue from San Jose is often just as convenient, and the only cost is an
extra hour or so on the train.

~~~
s0rce
A lot more from the East Bay sadly, takes about 1hr on BART to SFO from
Oakland, to get to San Jose I would have to take BART + Caltrain or just
drive. I wish their were more flights out of Oakland.

------
portal_narlish
On a trip to Europe last winter, United Airlines lost my luggage during a
connection at ORD. I landed in Germany in the dead middle of winter without
any clothing, and not a single United employee in person or on the phone could
tell me what had happened. Two days later, after dozens of calls and an
accumulated 8 hours on the phone (90% of that time was spent on hold), my
luggage was finally found. But the issues didn't end there. The flight number
of the flight I was told the bag would come in on was incorrect, twice, and
their incident tracking website (BagTrack) did not update once during the
entire fiasco. My luggage was delivered 4 days late, unannounced, by a random
third party courier. Mind you, this happened merely 12 hours before we had to
leave the city we were staying in.

I spent over a thousand dollars in the first couple days attempting to
repurchase the contents of my bag, assuming it was lost for good. The only
silver lining to this nightmare of an experience was the fact that United
refunded me the cost of replacing my clothes... a whopping 6 months after
filing a claim. Needless to say, I'm ecstatically cheering on their demise.

~~~
triangleman
Well the refund is nice to hear about.

------
tootie
Why is United taking more blame than the Chicago PD?

~~~
Turing_Machine
The Chicago PD wasn't involved with this at all.

It was "aviation police". No connection.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
Whoever they are it is a sad state of affairs. Obviously United is primarily
to blame for all of this - the CEO is so disingenuous - but who are these goon
like people who just follow orders without asking a single question. They
could have asked, what has he done? Is he a murder suspect, has he done
something awful? If the answer back was just, 'we've overbooked' then the
trivial nature of it all should have made them think.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"but who are these goon like people who just follow orders without asking a
single question. "

To a first approximation, everybody. Unfortunately.

[http://www.spsp.org/news-center/press-releases/milgram-
polan...](http://www.spsp.org/news-center/press-releases/milgram-poland-obey)

------
madiathomas
I need this kind of extension for companies I don't want to do business with.
Also need it for news sites with Adblock blockers. I don't want to see news
sites like forbes when searching for news. Is there a plug-in that removes
certain sites from my google search results?

~~~
macandcheese
You can exclude sites and pages from your search engine individually or in
bulk.

[https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/2631038?hl=en](https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/2631038?hl=en)

~~~
madiathomas
You are a life saver. Thank you. Let me start excluding them from my search
results.

------
pdxandi
I just booked my next work trip and even though United is the primary airline,
I went out of my way to fly on a different airline. I've personally had really
bad experiences with their flight staff and gate agents and this last weekend
made me feel it's worth rewarding airlines like JetBlue with my business.

------
usmeteora
I understand that corporations like airlines are doing difficult things that
very few groups are doing, and theres alot of logistics involved, including
but not limited to spiky gas prices and coping with the disparities between
dozens of international policies and financial regulations.

Stuff happens and people and companies mess up soemtimes. (to be clear, I
don't consider this most recent event with the doctor a mess up, its an
unexcusable event and way to treat a human being, and they deserve the
criticism and then some)

but it's not the fact that United airlines is constantly late for its flights,
overbooking, switching gates due to disorganization leaving customers on
connecting flights on their same airlines scrambling across multiple terminals
only to find they were 2 minutes late and United doesnt have the courtesy to
acknowledge their own systematic failure and wait for its customers, or the
fact that its providing horrible customer service all around.

It's the ATTITUDE they have about it. Everytime a company messes up, you have
an opportunity to actually leave a really great impression by handling it
well. Alot of good reviews on Amazon, restaurants and otherwise actually
result form an initial messup, but the customer going out of their way to
comment with how they were impressed they were with the way they handled it.

United has a blatant "we provide this to you and you obviously dont have any
other choice, so deal with it" attitude. And while its somewhat true, its
rubbing salt in the wound of its customers and being semi belligerantly
braggatory about their stance to abuse its customers because it's one of the
only choices around.

They don't notify customers when planes are late, they don't apologize, they
don't initialize alternate routes, they don't apologize when they kick you off
flights, they dont work with other airlines to reroute you and will make you
wait days to get another flights. They don't wait for you when their own
planes arrive late and other ones reroute to a new terminal for a connecting
flight. Their customers are in a constant state of scramble and uncertainty.

This attitude has never worked out well in history in capitalistic
environments or otherwise.

This on top of the interview I saw of the CEO yesterday and his passive
attitude about the whole thing, in addition to the leaked emails telling the
United Airlines employees they did the right thing, is just the icing on top
of the cake failure (thats all I got right now).

------
avenoir
I'm a little bit surprised that nobody addressed overbooking in this
particular situation. It's not just United, it's all airlines that overbook
their flights and it's hard for me to believe that it's a completely legal
practice.

------
throw2bit
All airlines in North America sucks. Take cue from Emirates and learn from
them. See how they treat economy class customers. I wont think twice to fly
Emirates , Etihad or Qatar.

~~~
macandcheese
JetBlue, Alaska, Virgin are all good options in my experience.

------
kensai
Hey, watched the demo of the service. Well, you may argue here that it makes a
disservice as it drops the cheapest flight.

------
tobyhinloopen
Added to support the cause. I don't even fly, just want to increase the number
of downloads :)

------
fixxer
If I removed every airline that sucked from my flight results, I'd be driving
to Paris.

I hope this reaction keeps going because I'm gonna load up on United stock. In
6 months, all these noise makers will be gone and we'll all realize United is
equivalent in shittiness to AA, Delta, etc etc.

~~~
btgeekboy
It's already too late to buy the stock on sale. From 5 days ago, UAL is down
only 0.19%. With DAL -.07%, LUV +4.04%, and ALK -1.54%, it's hard to argue
that one-off situations like this event, or Delta's multiple days of
cancellations, have much of an effect on investors.

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1492051502602&chddm=52003&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NYSE:DAL;NYSE:LUV;NYSE:ALK&cmptdms=0;0;0&q=NYSE:UAL&ntsp=0&ei=4OTuWJH0HZn82Aaar6-AAg)

~~~
arcticbull
As they say: 'sell hubris, buy humiliation.'

~~~
drjesusphd
This appears to be both.

------
peterburkimsher
"Is there a doctor on board?" "Not any more."

------
usmeteora
meglev trains anyone? Japan has some that go 400mph

------
JoshTriplett
From the title, I'd hoped this was a campaign to get travel sites to drop
United, not just an extension for one browser to hide search results from
yourself only.

------
hartator
I find that amazing that people manage to forget AA is way worse than United
on so many levels.

------
farzadb82
The thing I don't like about such plugins is that it suppresses the
conversation surrounding the practice of forced removals and overbooking in
general and the incident in particular.

A much better approach would be to be vocal about your choice and why it was
made through common social media outlets. Even simple posts that express your
decision to boycott and why help drive conversation around what's happening.

Besides, if you genuinely intend to boycott United why would filtering results
make a such difference? Are people worried that seeing their prices may
convince them otherwise?

------
speakerjack31
I would like to first say that what happened to the guy was horrible and don't
condone anything United did to him but I feel like this whole thing is blown
out of proportion.

First they can legally bump you from a flight if they need to[0]. You have no
right to walk on the plane and rosa parks your seat despite already paying for
the said seat. This should have at least been explained to the passenger and
the passenger should have said that he needed be on the plane for medical
emergency. Was it an medical emergency? Not sure - he might have been in alot
of trouble with his boss or something but no one has mentioned that he in fact
had to be on the plane no matter what. Regardless I haven't seen a video of
the interaction before he went wailing flailing through the seats.

This was a huge failure on part of the managers at United and they should be
sacked as soon as this court case is dealt with. The fact is that they laughed
in the face of passengers when someone mentioned they would have gotten off
the plane for $1000 abhorrent. I imagine this is where they will lose in
court.

[0] [https://thepointsguy.com/2017/04/your-rights-on-
involuntary-...](https://thepointsguy.com/2017/04/your-rights-on-involuntary-
bumps/)

------
daxfohl
If only there were a chrome extension to keep from getting shot by the police
while unarmed. Or your kid gassed to death by your president.

And what about Delta, the kids they kicked off their flight for not adhering
to dress code? Drop those flight results too? Maybe Rainman had it right,
Quantas and only Quantas?

What's next, the #PassengerConvenienceMatters movement? And then the
conservative response #ALLConvenienceMatters?

Perspective on these stupid incidents, that the passengers _signed on to when
they bought the tickets_ is entirely overblown. And pisses me off. </rant>

~~~
arcticbull
I didn't see getting beaten up by airport security anywhere in the contract of
carriage.

