47 CO Pax Imprisoned Overnight on Stinky E145 @ Rochester, MN
#61
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I work in customer service for a company that has both in house and contracted contact center employees. At no point would it begin to be acceptable to suggest that at any point we could begin to say to a customer that the reason we are not responsible for their poor experience is because they interacted with a vendor agent. They have their own managers, their own chain of command, but we take full responsibility for their actions.
I respectfully disagree.
The RJ services wear the Continental livery and has the Continental name on the fuselage.
It's like this: Suppose I had a moving company, and you paid my company to move you from point A to Point B. I couldn't do this economically with my trucks, so I ask a smaller company to move you. To make it look "official" and "seamless", I paint the smaller company's trucks with my company logo, and allow their employees to wear my uniform.
At the end of the day, I will be held responsible. I cannot say "Oh, I'm sorry your stuff didn't make it to your new house, but I can't refund your money. That's the contract company's fault, take it up with them."
The RJ services wear the Continental livery and has the Continental name on the fuselage.
It's like this: Suppose I had a moving company, and you paid my company to move you from point A to Point B. I couldn't do this economically with my trucks, so I ask a smaller company to move you. To make it look "official" and "seamless", I paint the smaller company's trucks with my company logo, and allow their employees to wear my uniform.
At the end of the day, I will be held responsible. I cannot say "Oh, I'm sorry your stuff didn't make it to your new house, but I can't refund your money. That's the contract company's fault, take it up with them."
Should CO learn some lessons from this event? Probably, but to paint CO as the bad guy is wrong.
I've run large construction job sites in the past. Aside from going over the main game plan with the subs, checking up on their work periodically, communicating with the team leader and making sure that everything is written in the contract, you have to be able to rely on the good judgment of your subs, that's what you're paying them for. They may screw up by no fault of your own, and that may reflect poorly on the general contractor AND the general may have to answer to the owner/developer for it, but in the end it was the sub that screwed up not the general.
#62
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Back to the construction analogy, if I, as a project manager had to hire a subset of superintendents to oversee the subcontractor's superintendents, well...I might as well just hire the crew myself. It's a redundancy that isn't supposed to, and shouldn't have to be there. That's the whole reason we have subs.
There is a rule of thumb too, for every construction job, big or small, there's almost always one sub that is a pain in the rear. Every time. And trust that when selecting subs, you go through great pains to make sure they're reliable, but there's always that ONE, grrrrrr.
#63
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In a perfect world I guess CO could have a subset of SOCC that monitors all of their contract carriers but really, this would be a waste of resources and would defeat the whole purpose of hiring and relying on subs. They don't have the money for that anyway.
Back to the construction analogy, if I, as a project manager had to hire a subset of superintendents to oversee the subcontractor's superintendents, well...I might as well just hire the crew myself. It's a redundancy that isn't supposed to, and shouldn't have to be there. That's the whole reason we have subs.
There is a rule of thumb too, for every construction job, big or small, there's almost always one sub that is a pain in the rear. Every time. And trust that when selecting subs, you go through great pains to make sure they're reliable, but there's always that ONE, grrrrrr.
Back to the construction analogy, if I, as a project manager had to hire a subset of superintendents to oversee the subcontractor's superintendents, well...I might as well just hire the crew myself. It's a redundancy that isn't supposed to, and shouldn't have to be there. That's the whole reason we have subs.
There is a rule of thumb too, for every construction job, big or small, there's almost always one sub that is a pain in the rear. Every time. And trust that when selecting subs, you go through great pains to make sure they're reliable, but there's always that ONE, grrrrrr.
But this isn't a GC/Sub-contractor relationship. It's a marketing agreement. The operator is ExpressJet, marketed through CAL.
As such, CAL has no operational liability.
Of course, Continental could chose to stipulate requirements for such circumstances on the part of its regional operators, but until such requirements are made obligatory by law, it is highly unlikely that any mainline carrier will stipulate them because they will add to the cost of these contracts.
And, after all, the whole point of regional carriers is to keep costs as brutally low as possible.
#64
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Rules 3 and 18 of CO's contract of carriage make it liable for Express Jet service on a ticket purchased from CO. That is the good news. The bad news is that Rule 28D exempts Co from liability for delay, or punitive, consequential or special damages and Rule 28d4 extents these protections to agents and employees in their scope of employment. So if you are passanger stuck on the tarmac for 9 hours maybe you can get your ticket refunded and a dollar from CO, but I am having trouble thinking of much of anything else you are going to get of CO.
It's also likely that it would be settled rather than going to trial, with both CO & Express Jet digging into their pockets.
#65
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#66
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While I agree this is a serious fault on the part of the carrier, don't make it sound worse than it was. Accoring to flights stats this flight arrived in Rochester at 12:26 AM. Accoring to the passenger they finally entered the terminal at 6 AM. This means they were "imprisoned" for a period of 5 1/2 hours, not nine as stated in the article. Exagerating doesn't help your cause.
After they were paroled into the concourse where they were so generously provided with a single complimentary beverage, they were reincarcerated on the the same plane (by then with non-functional lavatories) apparently for another 90 minutes to continue the trip to MSP.
#67
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Situations like these make me wonder how many veteran travelers were on board. Based on the replies here and my personal experience I'd assume that an elite (myself included) would be more likely to find a "solution" or at least raise some media eyebrows after a few hours of confinement.
While I'm generally opposed to a passenger "bill of rights" (largely because lengthy delays are often not under the airlines' control and returning to the gate will cause more gridlock and extend delays) I believe in this particular instance CO and XJT need to be held fully accountable. It's incumbent upon airlines to make sure that an airport filed as an alternate has adequate facilities to accommodate pax in the event of a diversion. In this case the dispatcher who filed the flight plan shares responsibility with the crew for sending them to an airport that was not equipped at that particular time of day.
While I'm generally opposed to a passenger "bill of rights" (largely because lengthy delays are often not under the airlines' control and returning to the gate will cause more gridlock and extend delays) I believe in this particular instance CO and XJT need to be held fully accountable. It's incumbent upon airlines to make sure that an airport filed as an alternate has adequate facilities to accommodate pax in the event of a diversion. In this case the dispatcher who filed the flight plan shares responsibility with the crew for sending them to an airport that was not equipped at that particular time of day.
#68
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Originally Posted by Express Jet Annual Report
Continental controls and is responsible for scheduling, pricing and managing seat inventories and is entitled to all revenue associated with the operation of the aircraft. We also have various other agreements with Continental that govern our relationship. Under the Continental CPA, all marketing-related costs normally associated with operating an airline are borne by Continental.
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Heck, one of the people stuck on that flight was a law school professor. Rut-roh!
#70
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The mainline carriers pay the regional carriers this set fee, the regional carriers, in turn, are thus justified in keeping their costs extremely low, while the mainline carriers, who are actually selling the tickets, are free to manipulate the free market to earn as much money as possible.
In all fairness, many of these regional routes have inconsistent LF's, so that, even with low costs, they are not always profitable for the mainline carriers (although they are usually profitable for the regionals, for whom the only variable cost risk factor is the cost of fuel).
Last edited by TWA Fan 1; Aug 9, 2009 at 2:30 pm
#71
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Again, and I already posted it, this is a complete misrepresentation of the relationship between CO and XJet in my opinion, here it is again since you apparently missed it in my previous post:
That is a lot more than a "marketing agreement" as is clearly laid out. I didn't post it previoulsy, but CO is also responsible for paying for fuel and the planes themselves. In reality all XJet does is hire and pay employees, everything else that XJet does is controlled by CO.
That is a lot more than a "marketing agreement" as is clearly laid out. I didn't post it previoulsy, but CO is also responsible for paying for fuel and the planes themselves. In reality all XJet does is hire and pay employees, everything else that XJet does is controlled by CO.
Since ExpressJet is thus the operator, they maintain operational responsibility and liability. This is obviously not a coincidence.
P.S.: Regional carriers pay for the fuel they use, regardless of whether it is supplied via the mainline carrier or another source
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#73
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All regionals pay for fuel, regardless of who supplies it, although risk can be reduced through the usual common schemes of hedging or bulk purchases, etc. (all of which are available to any mainline carrier).
#74
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Originally Posted by ExpressJet Annual Report
Under the Amended Continental CPA, Continental is responsible for the cost of providing fuel for all flights and for paying aircraft rent for all aircraft covered by the Amended Continental CPA and, therefore, these items are not included in our consolidated statements of operations for periods subsequent to July 1, 2008.
#75
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Posted while I was typing my previous post:
Did it ever occur to you that maybe I knew what I was talking about and maybe you should do one shred of research on your repeated claim?
By the way, that arrangement is not unique to XJT, from SkyWest's annual report:
By the way, that arrangement is not unique to XJT, from SkyWest's annual report:
Originally Posted by SkyWest Annual Report
Among other features of our fixed-fee agreements, our partners generally reimburse us for specified direct operating expenses (including fuel expense, which is passed through to our partners), and pay us a fee for operating the aircraft.