Originally Posted by
howto
I am astonished to see that
(1) their VDB offer starts at $250 USD
(2) VDB offers are negotiated with passengers individually, and even when you explicitly ask, they don't match the offer they agreed with another passenger. I mean, there are a whole plane of passengers to load, and the agents are taking the time to fight for $50-$100 zoo dollars. Do they get a bonus for giving the passenger less voucher for VDB?
Is this yet another characteristics of Continental, beside the landing skills of their pilots?
I don't know about the landing skills you're talking about, but for VDB compensation, they definitely require their GAs to play auctioneer and try to pay out as little as possible. It's just one of the CO characteristics of focusing on minutiae.
In some cases, they've started lower than $250.
What's interesting is that CO's on-time performance is pretty bad (they were last or second to last for each of the last 3 months, excluding Express carriers). You would think they'd try to focus on boarding efficiency, but instead they're focused on saving a bit of funny money here or there.