Originally Posted by
TLVorbust
For whatever reason El Al may have thought the the pax may now present some sort of security risk. I have had this happen to a friend of mine (he is extremely religious, and looks it, used to make the same number of flights, many of them in B, and had Matmid status.) He had one thing going against him, his last name was Arab, family of sephardic origin. One day he was flying out of TLV and when he went to check in, he was told that there was a problem and his reservation has been deleted. After having some personal friends work some official and unofficial channels he was able to fly standby. He went from front of B to back of Y (and this is when they still had the smoking section.)
Really I don't think security has anything to do in the present case... It is a very "usual" scenario of overbooking...but it's unbelievable that El Al employees in JFK didn't deploy their best efforts to find an alternative for these passengers to get to TLV as quickly as possible.
Is this really the best way to build a great "image"...? But that's the problem: as long as El Al will not understand that its passengers are CUSTOMERS who are not obliged to fly El Al, and as long as El Al will not treat them accordingly, which means with respect instead of crude chutzpa, it won't work...and El Al will remain in trouble.