RooseveltL

Absolutely a PR move.
A few facts people ignore:

• The flight with the incident was NOT overbooked - every passenger had a seat it was the GA who neglected to block out seats for necessary crew and later require volunteers already issued a seat assignment. If they did their job properly folks without seat assignment would have never boarded the aircraft so not one would require ejection.
• The airline was Republic Air DBA United Express and NOT the legacy airline like DL, AA, UAL directly which I doubt would have such a problem as the GA for major jets never have problems with these type of situations or authorization to get the flight out ontime (see 1st bullet). Customer service might be lacking in certain situations but I have never experience a GA delay a flight due to voucher amount whereas the United Express or its contract carriers can give a crap about punctuality.
• Great to post online but many folks who know many different routes to get home would be happy at $2,000 and route to alternate airport and a rental car. No one is going to hold out until th

e amount raises until 9,950 in normal circumstances.

apodo77

Definitely a PR move and IMO an overreaction to a single incident that odds would never happen again on any US airline. I mean it really hadn't happened before that I am aware of in millions of fligths.

Always good to see front line employees empowered though.

Widgets

I don't see how this is a PR move if it wasn't put in a press release. I think it's just a way to improve DBC statistics. If it were meant to be a PR stunt, there would've been a press release bragging about it and CNN would've eaten it up and compared it to United.

Renes Points

+1

I can see this dropping IDB to zero. I don't care where I am going if a Delta rep comes onboard and says we will give you $9000 to take a flight tomorrow I would be RUNNING off the flight. Heck, I bet there would be a stamped of folks off the jet (humm... Ruh Roh)!

lov2fly

Never will happen... Out of 100 plus people on any given flight there is got to be somebody who's threshold to volunteer is way less than $9K. In fact, I would bet that the offers don't get above $2K before somebody runs to the counter.

The surprising thing is that Delta was able to beat UA to the announcement - another sign that UA just doesn't have their act together.

Dieuwer

Couple years ago I was on DTW-PVG in Y+ where at the gate they were looking for two volunteers to give up their J seats. Offered about $1000 to take KE in J and arrive a few hours later. No takers.
I boarded and assumed IDB would take place.

KDCAflyer

I probably would have done it for $1500.

C W

Agree with both points. Delta has basically killed IDB with this, I can't imagine that on any flight they won't get as many volunteers as needed way before $10k.

And the UA thing is just astonishing. How long does it take the bean counters over there to set new limits? Or for Oscar to live up to the spirit of his ABC interview and unilaterally set policy to essentially eliminate IDB just like Delta just did?

DL-Don

Reports seem to indicate Dr. Dao was returning from Asia. If he was returning on a routing like aaa-LAX-ORD-SDF, the ORD-SDF leg was likely "assigned" a very low dollar amount relative to the entire ticket. I have had cases on many trips where the ATL-SDF or DTW-SDF legs on DL were assigned prices of less than $100 even though the entire trip was in F/J.

Duke787

Whose to say it won't eventually come to the attention of CNN and the rest while they continue their reporting on the UA deal.

Sometimes PR can be more effective when it's "discovered" organically instead of being fed directly to the media and turned into a press release. Especially in this case, there is no way they'd ever come close to that $9950 number if simply because a whole plane of passengers isn't going to successfully collude up that high (someone will eventually bite at a lower number unless literally the whole plane is headed to say the Super Bowl and no other flights exist).

Grouchy

Naah, Delta is making sure that their frontline employees have the proper tools to avoid another 'Dr. Dao' and with those amounts are sending a very clear message to them.

C W

I've had PDX-SEA assigned as low as $6 and ATL-LAS at $41 in V.

rylan

Good for DL. This can certainly help them avoid most if not all IDB situations. They'd likely get pax to volunteer for enough money.

Additionally this can help alleviate situations where they need to re-position crew on full flights.

GRALISTAIR

Exactly- the frontline employees are empowered showing they are trusted which to the vast majority of people is highly motivating

MSPeconomist

Not accurate:

The GA was a UA employee, not United Express, not Republic. At ORD, UA apparently staffs the gates for all United Express flights. To repeat, the GA who called for security was a UA employee.

The crew that needed to get onto the Republic flight were Trans State employees, to operate a flight the next morning that was Trans State for United Express.

The GA had offered UA$800 in UA vouchers, good for one year, etc. but there were no volunteers at this price.

A passenger offered to do a VDB for UA$1600 in UA vouchers, but the GA laughed and refused to consider it.

The IDBs were likely to get only a couple hundred dollars for a 22 hour delay. The GA picked those with the cheapest tickets for the segment. Dr Dao was connecting from LAX so his fare would have been allocated to the Louisville segment based on distance and he would have gotten almost nothing for a highly inconvenient IDB.