s0ssos

Well United is actually public

txflyer77

Anecdotally, this is been a good week for VX. I work for a satellite office of a big tech company in CA. On any given week 5-10 of us are flying DEN-SFO. Normally everyone flies UA due to schedule but seems like everyone's shifting to the VX flights.

tmac100

Yup! As the Eagles sang: Every form of refuge has it's price. Humans are humans and their rationalization/private logic for their behaviour is quite amazing

spin88

United flew 42.1 million passengers in 2016. If they have to reduce their pricing by $20/flight to intice people to fly the unfriendly skies, it will cost them $842M in revenue.

I will fly Ua when they are cheaper, but it takes much more than $20 for me to risk them, more like $300/ticket on a family trip, or the other day I flew them sfo-ord in f as they were $900/rt cheaper than VX.

I expect the hit to be greater than $20/rocket, as they will need to discount more than this on many routes and load factor will also fall, plus those likely to avoid united are those not flying on the ulcc fares.

The 2Q and 3Q results will be interesting to watch.

Pat89339

MODERATOR WARNING: This thread has drifted far off topic to a duplicate of the main thread. Multiple off topic posts have been deleted.

Please keep the discussion in this thread to the topic: Lost Business Fall-out from Flight 3411.

Pat89339, Moderator United Forum

John Aldeborgh

I wouldn't risk my family for any amount of money. If you believe you are risking anything than don't fly United. Comments like this are unjustified, look at the data.

I'm hoping there are more people who think like this so I can get better seating until people grow up. Flew back from Singapore to BOS last Tuesday and had an entire row to myself in coach, on the SIN to SFO leg, so I could lie down and sleep then I got a CPU from SFO to BOS. All the staff on the flight were professional and I was delighted.

Looking forward to the social activists punishing the many good UA employees for the mistakes of one or two idiots, Loyal United customers will be the beneficiaries of their meaningless protests, I thank them all.

NH_Clark

This +1

With so many UA employees working hard every day to provide safe and reliable service I do not condone ruining their job/livelihood over a couple of overzealous airport security officers.

I have spoken with my company's HR/travel coordinator and we are moving all of our "recommended airline partner" business away from AA/WN to UA in support and solidarity of the thousands of UA employees who work hard every day to provide great service.

JBord

We probably should stop calling them security officers, or "not even proper law enforcement". They are part of a police force that works for the City of Chicago Aviation Department. They're not private security or anything but police.

Goons and thugs, however, are fair game, and probably appropriate.

I agree, NH_Clark, it would be disappointing to see UA's business suffer because of an incident perpetrated by a city agency. I hope businesses are smart enough to understand that these police officers could have entered any plane, UA or otherwise, on that same day and could have done the same thing, if they were called. If businesses want to protest or boycott, I think it would be better placed on the City (and I hope they don't since those of us who live here need all businesses to make money and pay taxes ).

artvandalay

This has been an embarrassing week for UA's board, management and employees, and an expensive one for UA's investors. The fact that this sorry incident has had legs every day for an entire work week, played out on all the world's media, surely will have an impact on the bottom line. For years, when anyone's making a point about "lousy customer service," this event--and United Airlines--will be cited as the example.

Indeed

chavala

A friend of mine living in Bangkok, who I always thought to be very sensible, just refused my offer of 2 RPUs and club passes for his connecting SFO-EWR flights. He will sit in economy on any other airline rather than be comfortable on United. I tried to explain the real situation, how it wasn't actually UA dragging the guy, to no avail. Apparently the news stories in Asia are over-the-top insane. I'm actually pretty shocked to discover what an idiot he is!

If anything, I feel more loyal to the airline which has treated me very well (most of the time!) all these years.
Don't get me wrong -- I still love that Doctor for standing his ground! Rules will be changed because of his suffering and humiliation. He's my hero

Ma Ga

Agreed!!!

nutwpinut

I hope every airline follows suit and change their policy to this. Lost revenue will drive more changes from the airlines.

http://time.com/4741390/united-airlines-booking-policy/

denuaflier

I agree. I am flying Frontier of all airlines next week over United (and paying $600 for a ticket) that United could have had 10 days ago.

denuaflier

UA invited those police in the first place. They had not business calling the Police on a paying customer who had every right to his seat.

bocastephen

I would say your friend is not an idiot. The Asia press has been slaughtering United all week, and this is being positioned as much as a racist issue as a service issue. Based on my own conversations with friends and customers over there, along with everything I've read on social media, I would say United is dead-on-arrival in that market for the foreseeable future and will either need to absolutely slash airfares in both cabins down to bare bones levels not seen before to entice travelers back, or prepare to write off any growth potential there, and plan for a major retracement in bookings.

The depth of this issue is unprecedented. Malaysian Airlines can crash airplanes left and right and still draw business, but United will end up faring worse from this incident.

For those trying to grasp the concept and effect here, let me draw an analogy - what would happen to Lufthansa's business to/from Israel if they were caught physically abusing Jewish passengers and using nazi salutes while doing it. That same emotional response is what is occurring in Asia today. It's just that bad,.