Originally Posted by
Baze
So many assumptions with no facts in evidence in this thread.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/todayi...storm/4337773/
Each airline will get impacted differently because not every airline has the exact same routes, planes, staffing at each airport. UA doesn't have an unlimited supply of reserve pilots at each airport.
Yes, each airline is impacted differently. But even when the impact is roughly the same, there are choices about how to respond. There are two sources of variance.
Originally Posted by
spin88
I think you are wrong about ORD, AA has a roughly similar portion of its traffic as "connecting" traffic. But I do think you are correct about UAL's decission here, and its nice to see someone come clean on it.
UAL had two choices:
(1) It could
try to get folks to their destinations.
Doing so would involve paying large amounts of OT pay and other expenses and at the end of the day having some planes or people be out of place. Passengers may be late, but they get to their destination, and we have all been in "weather events" and when an airline goes the extra mile, we are grateful, it ads to our loyalty. This is what DAL and AA chose to do.
(2) it can cancel flights, and tell passengers to go stuff it. It then offers them flights in a week, tells them they can't get a refund and UAL will not pay any of their expenses. This saves UAL money AND has the benefit of pushing up PRASM as flights are then 100% packed for a few days and UAL has flown fewer ASMs system wide. However, it angers a lot of people and you get what you see on UAL's facebook page - which is thousands of upset people. Hopefully, many of these folks file DOT complaints about things like refusing to refund tickets or trying to charge a change fee.
]Regardless, as you admit, with the current management, doing the right thing, or trying to get people to their destination on time, or at all, is about the 18th priority. 
Exactly. I saw nothing in the data linked (though there was a lot of it and some not available) indicating any major difference between UA and AA in terms of the relative importance of connecting passengers at ORD.
Yes, airlines are impacted differently. No one denies this. But there are also differences in how they choose to respond even to the same impacts. So the question is whether canceling all TATL flights is the because UA is impacted differently than AA or because the response it chooses is different.