Originally Posted by
t325
Yes, that does seem silly. Take the example yesterday. 582 got to ORD at 9:19 PM. If there was an STL passenger who missed his original connection, their only option would have been UAL 4665, scheduled to depart at 10:30 PM, but that was canceled. If it was not possible to de-plane in STL, anyone bound for STL would have been spending the night in ORD. I guess United could say that it was weather and it's not their problem. But if the initial diversion was due to MX, and there wasn't a later ORD-STL flight, they'd be on the hook for a hotel room all because of a stupid policy like that.
If there was one passenger in that flight heading to STL, the overhead for the policy would be negligible. If the entire plane was heading to STL it would be costly. As with everything else, these things are generally done to minimize operational cost and/or operational risk on a large scale (1000s of PAX per day). Trying to extrapolate the effect to an N=1 case isn't really worth the time.
That having been said, last time I was diverted to DAY for WX in ORD the plane was deboarded, so you would've been free to go. I personally switched to a DAY-DEN flight rather than go through ORD and they pulled my checked baggage for that as they were reboarding the flight to ORD.