Beckles

I'm curious if you know who made the decision, I would hope not HR.

I work for a firm with a similar number of travelers throughout the country (and in particular with an office in DEN), I am not aware that there has been any discussion of being so prescriptive to our employees in who they choose to travel with. If they choose not to fly United, that's fine, but I don't believe we would ever ban them from flying an airline.

kenn0223

Who knows, my guess is that they assumed it was like most other incidents where a passenger is physically removed from a flight by police. I'd bet once a quarter there is a video on Reddit or YouTube that shows someone getting hauled off a United flight. I think their primary concern at the time was assuring employees that they will stand behind them if they want to have a passenger removed.

What stock price drop?!? UA was at $70.55 on Monday AM. Today it is at $69.93 and two weeks ago it was at $65.28. Compared to peers and the markets in general UA is outperforming in the period.

In the same time period DL has actually "dropped" from $51.87 in Mid-March to $45.05 today. Today they also announced at $125M loss due to some thunderstorms in ATL that took them 5 days to recover from.

From at shareholders point of view I'd be far more concerned about the issues DL is having than UA. Once is real cash out the door and the other (so far) is bad press and an $XXM settlement at some point in the future that they can split with the City and likely have partially paid by their liability insurance.

The current UA situation is much more dramatic and is getting a lot more TV time but UA didn't have to cancel 4,000 flights over 5 days due to some rain in ATL. As an investor in both, the latter is much more worrisome.

SFO_FT

For me, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. As someone noted, being loyal to UA since the merger has felt like being in an abusive relationship: "but this time it will be better ... he didn't mean to hit me". I feel sick every time I get on a UA flight, anxious about when my flight will go mechanical, will UA reroute me, etc. They're getting a time-out through the end of the year. (It's not like the poorly maintained aircraft and lousy 737 F seats are going to get replaced anytime soon, so there's not much they can do to get me back.)

It's taken me a long time of this bad relationship to realize I CAN DO BETTER. Will I eat some non-refundable tickets, yep? But the thought of spending one more minute on UA truly makes me sick. Life is too short!!!

bioyuki

I work for a fairly large company that does a decent amount of travel. UA and its JV partners are our preferred carriers, but every employee can book whatever s/he wants as long as they stay within certain cost caps. For domestic, the cost caps are set such that non-refundable Y fares are preferred, and the travel manager I talked to there said there hasn't been much change there.

For TPAC or TATL we get to book refundable J, and the travel manager said he saw a large shift in rebookings towards NH, BR, CA (crazy I know), LH, and TK since the news broke.

Beckles

Do you subscribe to the theory that there's no such thing as bad publicity?

I'm not sure I believe this will have a huge impact on United, but for comparison last year their revenue in Q2 was about $9.5 billion, while I don't think this incident will sink them, I could easily see it costing them 2% of their revenue in this quarter alone, which would exceed what Delta attributes losing in a week due to thunderstorms.

kenn0223

Everyone has their issues. What are your thoughts on on DL's two system-wide meltdowns this year? One in Jan related to a power outage and the second this last week due to thunderstorms in ATL. Both caused chaos for days and resulted in thousands of canceled flights. Seems to me that sort of think is much more likely to impact you than a freak event as is being discussed.

Austin787

I can see a United competitor announcing a fare sale:

Fares from $34.11, for routes such as Chicago - Louisville and many more. Don't drag your feet - these low fares won't last long. We look forward to welcoming you onboard our planes and actually flying you to your destination - leggings and all. Just remember our airplanes are a no smoking and no dragging zone.

kenn0223

I think bad publicity is relevant but I doubt this will have will have long term impact. For nearly every traveler [1] air travel is a commodity with only a small amount of price differentiation. My theory is that the facts will come out by the end of the week that will explain away a lot of this. I expect the City of Chicago will come out saying their security guys screwed up and used way too much force and have been fired (or maybe even charged with a crime). I also expect more will come out about what happened before the video that will shift more blame from UA to the passenger (rightly or wrongly). In the end, this will all be forgotten a week from now and everyone who says "I'll never fly UA again" will have a private change of heart when they book another ticket because DL and AA either add a connection or at $X00 more expensive than UA.

1 - Save apparently all of FT that have the most generous corporate travel policies on the planet and piles of personal cash.

Beckles

I understand where you're coming from, but the publicity this story is getting is literally on a different level than any other airline customer-service related story I ever recall. I listen to CNBC a lot in my car and they literally can't go 30 minutes without bringing up this story in one fashion or another.

In cases where other options are similar in price and convenience to UA, some passengers will definitely take this into account. There are a lot of flyers who dislike WN, but they have a big presence in many UA cities and maybe some flyers will think they don't look quite as bad. I'm not saying it will be a mass exodus by any means, and well there isn't a hard number like DL put on its problems last week already, I think it's almost impossible to believe it won't cost them at least $125 million in lost income (as I said, that's just a couple percent of their revenues for just this quarter).

stockmanjr

It will be a cold day in hell before Rahm's cronies admit they did anything wrong imho. Surprised he hasn't had a presser throwing United under the bus yet.
Cheers
Howie

kenn0223

I don't buy it. For all the people defecting from UA due to this there are others to take their places. Next week when Bob the brake-pad salesman goes to book his flight from Fargo to Las Vegas for the big conference and UA is $100 less than DL Bob is going to book UA because his boss won't spend the extra $100 and Bob has been saving UA miles for decades. UA lives on the Bobs of the world.

The elusive premium flyer who picks airlines based on their view of the brand and the service is as elusive and non existent as a 1K with abs.

SFO_FT

All of the carriers have had systemwide outages -- any big business does. The difference is that at AA and DL I have had generally good experiences. If I'd been abused by UA for only a short time, I'd feel differently and probably stick it out as I've been 1K since the program started in early 1994.

I believe that one of the reasons this incident has been such a flash point for me and others is that we're finally realized that it's not "us", it's UA. Sunday's incident reflects the carrier's go-by-the-book attitude -- prior to CO's takeover, UA staff were empowered to make things right -- the CO management style, which served them well when it was just CO -- doesn't provide the flexibility I/others need. I find that SOME other carriers are much better in this regard: DL, AS, NZ to name a few.

Separate from the UA service offering, too many of the aircraft have lousy seats that won't be fixed any time soon. I find the Polaris product tacky and childish. Have a look at the new DL premium cabin service ware -- gorgeous! DL has style and has made the types of investments I value.

kenn0223

Ha, I hear ya. I moved most (200k +/-) to DL years ago (having been a pmUA flyer) since, absent their quarterly meltdowns, they arrive on-time and their staff is nice. I still end up on UA a few times a month and they have gotten better. Still a lot of the "No Waivers, No Favors" attitude to go around.

UA (and *A) still has, IMHO, the best global network but I think DL has some tricks up it's selves (see their minority ownership of several foreign carriers). It will be interesting to see what Mr. Parker does with AA.

On the outages side. There are few Fortune 100 companies that would survive a 5 day computer system problem. In fact, I think airlines are unique in the fact they can still use "computer failure" as just a part of doing business. If AT&T's cell phone towers stopped working nationwide and it took them 1/2 a week to get them all up and operating normal again it would be pandemonium. Airlines just seem to shrug it off as do their customers.

raehl311

I assure you, I am far from a rule follower, but I did AGREE to these rules, as this guy did, so he should follow them.

Full disclosure: I was booked on the morning SDF-ORD flight this crew was coming to fly. So this guy was literally trying to get MY flight cancelled because he thought he didn't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us.

(Not that I care, I ended up taking a flight later in the day anyway, but I absolutely want flight crew to be able to boot passengers to avoid flight cancellations and I'm willing to take the miniscule risk of an IDB to not have a whole bunch of my flights delayed/cancelled because United can't move crew around.)

Productivity

So is your company also boycotting ORD and Republic Airlines, flying as AA and DL, or is your HR making a response without actually understanding what will prevent its employees being put in a similar situation?