Originally Posted by
cmdinnyc
This is pretty much spot on. The airlines KNOW IRROPS happen. They know it's cold and it snows in the winter. They know when hurricane season occurs.
I'd give them a pass for an event like an earthquake or similar event that is, in fact, unpredictable. But on the whole the weather is relatively predictable in the short run (hey - it's probably going to snow in the northeast in 2-3 days) as well as in the long run (it's cold and snowy in January in North America and warm with thunderstorms in July and August). There's simply no good excuse for not having well-planned processes (with the supporting technology) for managing IRROPS.
I'm actually going to disagree with this. Comparing resourced needed to handle spike in say, holiday demand at Amazon, which occurs on predictable timeframe, and IRROPS due to a nearly unprecedented weather situation (seriously - when was the last time you saw a weather waiver that spanned multiple hubs and eight days?) is not fair.
United needs trained representatives to handle this sort of demand. How many of these people do you want to be sitting around the rest of the year just to offer lower hold times in case of severe weather? Also, how do we know that the system isn't working as designed? Let's say the hold times got to be 4 hours plus. What's better - having people sit on hold this time, or simply offering a busy signal which means - we're too busy to take your call!
I would actually much prefer getting kicked out with a busy signal than sitting on hold for hours on end with no actual certainty you'll ever get through.
And by the way, even Amazon didn't meet their forecasted demand. UPS couldn't handle the volume of orders and thus some delays in getting people their packages on time occurred.