Originally Posted by
jsloan
Simple. The customer doesn't care about D:0, at all. Barring some ridiculous scenario straight out of the movies -- "whoo, we departed; the corrupt foreign police can't touch us now" -- it matters to zero people on the plane whether or not they depart on time.
Now, A:0? That matters. And you can argue that D:0 impacts A:0 -- all other things being equal, the earlier you depart, the earlier you'll arrive. But sometimes other things aren't equal. In the OP's case, is it more customer friendly to get every passenger save one to SAN ten minutes ahead of schedule, or to get every passenger to SAN exactly on schedule? If UA were monitoring A:0 instead of D:0, they may be more willing to hold flights when there's no impact to A:0 than they are today.
Now, again, there are a lot of factors, and a 5 minute departure delay could easily turn into a 25 minute arrival delay, so I'm not arguing in favor of a blanket "always wait for nearby pax" rule. But it's plain to see that a focus on D:0 is not customer-centric; UA should focus on A:0 instead.
You can't have a good A:0 without first having a good D:0 (unless you believe in excessive, unrealistic block times that wastes time, hides a poor operation, and increases costs). Have to put the horse before the cart. It's not even an argument that D:0 impacts A:0. There's many problems with relying on A:0. There's a lack of a hard line for a goal. It promotes sloppiness. It promotes laziness. It doesn't promote running an ontime operation. Another issue is that it promotes kicking the can of responsibility to remain ontime down the road. "We'll make it back up later" is the thought process that's promoted. It's so ironic that the whole reason the OP's misconnect happened in the first place was a late inbound. What if that inbound could have gotten out 10 minutes earlier and returned to LAX 10 minutes earlier? We don't have a thread. Do the math. Let's say the flight would have been slid back 10 minutes if they would have accommodated the OP. It was a full flight. 75 passengers lose 10 minutes. 750 minutes lost total. One PAX gets left behind and loses about 128 minutes, the same as the OP. Also, that's 10 fewer minutes for the return SAN-LAX to turn and remain ontime. Under normal circumstances it would be fine, but things happen. That's 10 fewer minutes to fix a mechanical problem, etc. 10 minutes later back to LAX could mean even more misconnects. Soon a few are inconvenienced more seriously than one minor inconvenience. That's the cascade that can happen.
There's a reason there's a high correlation between UA's rising D:0 and A:0/A:14 stats over the past few years. D:0 is where it starts. It's undeniable that a D:0 focus is customer-friendly for the vast majority of passengers. Some people certainly lose out, but they are few.
It's also very wrong to say that matters to zero people whether a flight left ontime. It means making departure slot. It means a higher chance of arriving ontime. And unbeknownst to them, because other flights left ontime, there could a gate available at arrival.