blueman2

OK, I take back what I said about this particular GA. I think I read my own bad experiences with nasty GAs into this story. I was wrong.

spin88

Fastair, unlike the other UA employees who post, but don't acknowledge the affiliation, I always appreciate your perspective, so direct this question to you. The OP linked to a photo of the offending bag, and I'll post it below because I assume you have not seen it:



This is a young Chinese woman, 1K member, who is a tennis pro, and an agent gets into a battle over a bag that fits like this does in the sizer...

As others have noted, and you well know, there is absolutely no problem with this bag on the airplane. It fits fine, and in the space of a regular roll-away. (let me know if you disagree?)

So are you going to tell her to check it? Was it good customer service to do what the GA did?

And if the attitude of UA's gate agents is to go after tennis pros with bags that fit like this in the sizer, and for that matter other elite members, how long do you think United will be in business? Serious question.

FlyngSvyr

please read the last 10 posts or so and explore the links associated with them. It paints a vastly different picture of the incident. The tennis bag "fully loaded" was almost as big as the back I check into the belly of the plane.

emcampbe

the fact is, I could fit a full size duffel bag in a bin. I could also crawl up there myself, lie down, and fit in there. That doesn't mean it is or should be within the rules. Let's not forget that the plane is going to have 150 other people in it, and a bin goes over 1 - 2 rows of a plane. That means it needs to hold the stuff of 3-6 people. So now, because someone is a tennis pro [or insert other profession that is so special here who should be exempt from the rules], they should be able to take up mine (or others) bin space). So when I arrive and my (size-compliant) bag won't fit in the bin near my seat because ms. Thing tennis pro (or whatever 'special' profession) think the size regs don't apply to them, then what. I need to put my bag in a bin near someone else's seat (and let's not kid ourselves, this is another not infrequent topic on FT), then what? Now someone doesn't have space for their bag because of this.

Why should that be? And where does someone draw the line. Should someone be able to take the bin space of several others? 2 people? 3 people? 5? 7? Last I checked 1Ks aren't entitled to a bigger in-cabin bag allowance, and for good reason - because no others stuff would fit. I get the attitude that 1Ks should get some perks for their spend, but should. that that come at the cost of everyone else's?

As I've said upthread, I am weary in believing anyone's story who's first move is to rant about it on social media. There is now a conflicting report from someone else who saw the whole thing noting that much of the rant is not the way this went down. And further bad behavior in the part of the tennis player to go ahead and post images of the employee in question - just extremely bad form. IMO, Ua can let this one go to UA/DL.

cerealmarketer

You're missing a photo...



The way I read it UA allows a tennis racket bag to come on board with more than one racket inside.

Statements from others say there was more than a racket and balls in the bag, and more than two bags.

All she had to do was remove the non tennis items from the bag and carry o no more than two items. Would have been fine and her rackets safe..

And ultimately she did board the flight with her rackets.

benitovacation

GA is in hospitality, not law enforcement. It would only cost pax more hassles to carry on all these stuffs than (presumably) check-in and what she carries is either fragile or for onboard use. Common sense or lack of... What's the point of enforcing if not stretching border line things with zero impact on boarding process or flight safety. And cutting a bit slack for 1K is good customer service, isn't it?

IMO, UA does not have racial issue, it apparently has business culture problem. UA values little about customer experience and it could eventually tilt the boat if bad PR, justified or not continuously piles on, especially happened to be Asians...

FlyngSvyr

WHAT??? So UA is supposed to let an Asian 1K carry on a full sized piece of luggage (look at the pics) on the the plane so they can win some kind of PR war that is being waged against them. That is ridiculous.

There are rules and regulations that the airlines put into place for a reason. This piece of luggage (fully loaded) was not even close to being within those rules. If they had let her carry it on, the other 100+ pax watching would have walked away wondering why she was allowed to skirt the rules and they could not (leaving a bad taste in their mouths).

It's very convenient to pile on UA now and I get that it is going to happen more & more since the Dao incident. But IMHO the GA is the real victim in this situation. She is having her picture plastered all over the internet and being labeled a racist, redneck, etc... on Twitter & Facebook. It appears to me that a spoiled tennis star is using her status to trash an airline & the GA (by taking her pictures and posting them online) when she was clearly in the wrong. 95% of the public (& her followers) are never going to know the "truth" of the incident and are just going to leave with their initial impression that UA wronged their hero. They are too lazy to do the research and just rely on being spoon fed partial information.

It is so sad that critical thinking is lost on this new generation

wolf72

No, what he is saying is UA should do what other airlines do in these situations: use a bit of common sense.

Something which is lacking.

You can cut a passenger a bit of slack and let them take their tennis rackets on and do both the pro player and the airline a favour.

Bring back a happy customer who will continue to fly on your airline and to give you business and ensure as a pro, she is able to earn a living as a tennis professional player by ensuring her rackets get from A to B intact without being damaged.

Maybe have a word with her in future to please reduce the weight of the tennis bag in that the bag is for rackets and balls only in a NICE MANNER without getting confrontational.

UA has this habit of wanting to take on passengers in stupid tit for tat arguments.

Do you see other airliners having arguments over bloody tennis racket bags anywhere else in the world? No.

Why? Look at the quality of GA's they hire in comparison to UA,



Have to agree with you.

Kevin AA

I'm surprised TSA let her put such a huge bag on the X-ray belt. Fully loaded, the thing is massive. I know the sizers of the 90's are gone, but there is a physical limit to what can go through.

Now that I think about it, because TSA has no limit on the number of items you can send through the X-ray belt (you have to with the shoe and laptop removal requirements), she may have taken things out at security and then put everything back together so that it's "one" carry-on.

The carry-on rules are in place for a reason, and it's not to nitpick at people or to make them miserable. With existing limits, the overhead bins fill up already as it is! It's because if everyone could take on board a massive bag like that, instead of the overheads filling up before the last group of people board, the overheads would fill up 1/3 of the way through and then 2/3 of the passengers have to gate-check their stuff because some people want to take everything but the kitchen sink on the plane.

Airplanes are not cruise ships and people need to stop treating them as such. Check your steamer trunk where there's room for it -- in the cargo hold -- and this nonsense will stop.

Xyzzy

This is NT a racial issue. This is a customer service issue. The race of the customer is immaterial.

aoumd

I like how you put this, with the emphasis on "common sense - and "NICE MANNER." Yet another situation where too visible a faction* of COdbaUA has strayed a full 180 degrees from the culture Gordon Bethune instilled when he turned CO "From Worst to First." That culture specifically shifted away from employees escalating things on their end with overly banal interpretations and/or determinations of when to step in regarding customer service policy enforcement. In fact, Gordon's customer service strategy, among other things, included literally having staff gather customer service policy manuals and lighting them on fire in the CO HQ parking lot. Then putting together a new set of customer service "guidelines" that emphasized employees' use of common sense to de-escalate things without allowing ridiculous abuses of policy to go unchecked (literally or figuratively?). He even openly encouraged employees to bend rules to prevent ridiculous situations from being the end result, emphasizing the spirit of a customer service guideline rather than the letter. Same company. Well at least half of it.

If it were my airline, I'd have 100% Space Bins (and the Airbus equivalent) on my mainline narrowbody fleet, and tell employees to police the obvious stuff re: carry-ons that actually would create a problem on a plane with 100% Space Bins, but not waste time with the borderline stuff. Make sure the situation is nowhere near close enough to the policy for a rational argument -- or a FlyerTalk discussion hundreds of posts long -- if an employee steps in. My goal would be to try and lead in a service industry, and not sink to the level of a K-12 school administrator (the original source of near-daily news stories of ridiculous results from an obsessive policy enforcement culture to the blindness of anything else, before the media shifted their focus to airlines). After all, these are customer service policies, not FAA directives or criminal laws we are talking about here.

* I say "too visible a faction" because I know most UA staff really do want to provide the best service -- and many do. The bad apple employees are the minority, but they need to be addressed visibly by management as news stories drive public perception of the brand.

fastair

You ask a valid but unanswerable question. 2d pictures don't always tell a 3D story, perspective can be painted based on the presenter's bias. I know with 100% certainty that the sizer for primary piece is 1" larger than permitted on all 3 dimensions so people don't have to wedge them. So from this picture it looks 3 plus the 1 free inch too large. It'd be a tough call for me. Likely not. Its usually the 9" dimensions that gets exceeded and I look the other way up to about 19" (the extra sizer inch and an addl.). So now we look at what is presented as the bag BEFORE she unpacked it. If the pic is accurate, 100% it gets checked.

The way i see it most airlines allow free bags to be checked by elites, but the carryon requirements, at least on US flagged carriers, don't change based on status. It's my understanding that once filed with the DOT as the policy (a policy is required, but each airline can submit anything for approval) that it becomes de facto, administrative law. The exceptions are also filed. The exception for tennis bag doesn't specify size, but it does specify contents. Her contents, an additional carry on bag, voided that exemption for her. Live by the exception rule, die by it. Double edged sword.

I have no qualms about gate checking ANY offender's bag, regardless of status. If UA refiled the rules with the DOT giving elites more than just free overweight bags in lobby, but bigger carry on bags, I'd have no problem with that either.

Here re is how I internalize it. On most flights, compliant bags are going to be force checked when the bins are full. How is it good service or fair to allow some people to not comply, while the space they took up could be available for a group 4 compliant bag? "But it fits in the bin". Yea, my car can do well over 100 mph, when stopped for violating, I don't say that I do it all the time and I don't say that the car and road are capable of such speeds, I quietly accept the consequences of my exceeding the regulations. I guess I wouldn't care as much if everyone had room for their compliant bags, but that isn't a reality. Those that can check it for free, those that know the dimensions from passing the sizer a dozen times or more/yr, those that should never try to bring it past security because of the knowledge and free alternatives should not be given a pass to take another person's space that doesn't have free options to check it, yet still complies with the rules and has to gate check it anyway.

People like that put their own convenience above other's cost and convenience, while flaunting their rule breaking, and then causing a scene arguing about what the sizer shows plain as day. Why the need to argue, the sizer gives you more than you're permitted already and you (not you, her, in this hypothetical case) failed that simple and clear litmus test. Then upon the theatrical unpacking, we see that the one leg you had to stand on, a non-measured bag that can only contain racket and balls, is stuffed with additional items to far exceed any rule. In her case, that bag gets checked.

Overhead bin space is a limited resource, like water on a ship's evacuation rafts stuck at sea for days. Everyone, by rule gets the same allocation. A few people, say the officers, decide that they can take more water and cause the passengers or the chefs or stewards to go without. Not the way a ship should be run IMHO (yes, it'd be nice if the raft had more water for everyone, they designed it differently, but given the variables and rules currently in place, that's what we have to work with...not liking the way Basic economy has played out so far, I think some tweaking needs to be done, but it DOES help with the bag space, which is a partial game changer, at least as far as bin over crowding.)

aoumd

What I REALLY want to know from this photo is: did the employee actually stretch out the bag to make it look larger in the sizer as she was accused?

kb9522

Yeah, because if you let someone get away with something once, they never use that as justification to try and get away with it again. And again. And again....



Because other airlines refuse to enforce their own policies and make other passengers in cabin have to deal with the headaches. Good on UA for actually enforcing rules. They should be commended for this, not attacked.

Sounds like the passenger emptied the bag before putting it in the sizer to make it look smaller than it was (and even then it was still not compliant).

There is another picture of the bag with stuff inside it and it is outrageously huge.

FlyngSvyr

You are correct, the race of the passenger has nothing to do with this. The only reason I even mentioned it is because the OP brought it up as if it somehow mattered that a certain ethnic group was being "wronged" and UA should have looked the other way due to it.

As far as being a customer service issue, you are correct also. The GA enforced the rules fairly so that ALL of the customers on the plane would have adequate space and even mediated with the passenger so that she could still get her precious tennis rackets on the plane by putting them in a tote and checking her oversized luggage under the plane. It seems to me she found a solution to the problem that worked. What did the GA get for her troubles? Libelous slander

What she DID NOT do was let an entitled pax flaunt the rules and get her way. I'm sorry, but some FTr's idea of customer service seems to be letting the pax do whatever they want. Life just doesn't work that way.

I would get it if the bag was at the edge of the rules but from the picture of the loaded bag, it was not even close. I would expect ANY GA to turn around a pax with that sized carry on and have their luggage checked. I would be upset if they did not.

According to the twitter user who witnessed the event & is referenced in posts above, the tennis player is the one who stuffed the bag into the sizer and took the picture to try and show the bag fit. Of course, this is after she removed its contents. I highly doubt the GA ran over there before the picture was snapped to "fluff it up".

Look at the pictures of the loaded bag. Ridiculously huge.