Originally Posted by
fastair
And I can from a 1st person point of view describe when an alliance partners plane diverted to ORD after their staff had left, their crew bolted, and myself and co workers picked up the slack until hours later, when their staff could come to the airport. Same for a large non-networked carrier with huge MDW prescience diversion to ORD that My airlines staff absorbed the ground handling/communications until the that carrier folk got to ORD from MDW (3 hours later-Siri says that's 15 miles away.)
And I don't doubt that even the slightest bit!
What I am trying to point out is that (at least in this case!) LH had a functioning fallback scenario that set the wheels in motion for a replacement aircraft to be flown in very timely, thus ruling out wild overnight adventures for the passengers. Will the passengers be joyful because of that? Certainly not. But LH came through and did whatever they could to fix it, and that translates into the absence of a total PR desaster like the one UA now (rightfully so) received yet again.
Im some counts the UA958 case was a similar situation : Plane diverted to an airport roughly 2 hours away from a major hub of the airline, and the plane was in no condition to continue. LH was able to mitigate the impact to the utmost extent possible, UA seems to be in no such position these days.
And please don't get me wrong: I am well aware that there are many great folks at UA who DO care, but as a total, UA is nowhere near it needed to be from a customer's perspective. And this is not just my opinion, but this unfortunately gets proven over and over again every day.