StuckinITH

Maybe she has always dreamed of taking a trip to Australia or Thailand or France or whatever other destination looks enticing in First Class.

transportprof

If she wants to get to Thailand or Australia in F, she'll have to fly another airline. Maybe Paris still has Polaris F for a while longer?

PaxALotl

I just read all of her tweets, and my conclusion is this is one of the many people who jump at the chance to get into a public fight with United. She's a communication director and has 13k tweets on Twitter, so she is no stranger to trying to get attention online.

"Look at me! I say United is bad, therefore I am good!"

It looks like the reason for all of this is that there was a broken seat. If they had boarded the plane with the broken seat, it would have been tweets like, "United is the worst, my seat is broken! Never flying United again, they don't care about their seats..."

StuckinITH

She can go to Thailand in Polaris First if she flies ORD-PVG-BKK or ORD-HKG-BKK. I grant you that Australia would be more difficult. Europe is still easy. I have not checked Paris but know that MUC or BRU still has the 3 class 772 from ORD.

Or maybe her dream is to fly the real Polaris Business.

Or her dream is to visit family and friends in First Class on domestic flights.

PS: Forgot to quote and now cannot find how to add the quote.

transportprof

You can only use those ETCs on United metal. No United metal lands in BKK, that I know of.

jsloan

(a) I doubt she really has any idea whether or not it was the last seat; (b) I don't believe it's the lowest fare, but rather lowest fare class that qualifies, and both N and X may be available for the last seat; (c) in some markets, you'll see occasional 0-day G fares available, so you may literally have the cheapest paid ticket on the plane and get the last seat if UA has decided to go Y1 ... G1.

Not with a voucher. UA metal only.

chermorg

StuckinITH

OK, forget about the dream of going to Thailand. Does not matter anyways. HKG and PVG and PEK are wonderful places to visit in Asia.

joe_miami

If this was due to a broken seat, as alleged in the woman’s tweets, why wouldn’t that person simply be out of luck and then compensated/re-accommodated? Why would any airline bump some other passenger?

jjmoore

Well well.... in an unorthodox way, the first $10,000 voucher can now be posted on this site:

http://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/bumped-united-passenger-walks-10000-voucher/story?id=53956077

This should have been an IDB, but when offered a $10,000 TCVA, I would not ask another question, as did the person in this example.

chermorg

She (the woman involved) is claiming heavily that this was IDB. If she is lying to try and make United look bad, I sure as hell hope it comes back to bite her in the butt.

chermorg

Because this was not due to an issue outside the control of United. Simply put, United sold more seats than it ended up being able to furnish - this is the case regardless of if a "seat" actually is present on the plane and broken, or if there is simply more tickets than there are seats on the plane to begin with. Once the seat was inop, the flight became oversold, and as such, there was a denial of boarding. The issue then becomes is it voluntarily denied or involuntarily. United cannot (per it's own CoC and the CFR itself) involuntarily deny boarding to the person assigned the broken seat until they have asked for volunteers. Even after that, they must follow their procedures for priority of involuntarily denying a passenger boarding.

edit: This is a link to the statement (scroll a tad down, background light blue) that they would have had to give to the woman when she was denied boarding: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/250.9

None of the exceptions cover an inoperable seat. The closest one would be an aircraft swap for safety or operational reasons - but there was no aircraft swap here. The woman, depending on the alternate flight she was assigned to, would have been due anywhere from nothing to 400% of her fare in cash/check compensation, depending on delay to first stopover/destination.

The woman would have seen "The passenger may insist on the cash/check payment or refuse all compensation and bring private legal action" on the statement United was legally mandated to provide her regardless of if denied involuntarily. The woman knowingly and willingly accepted the voucher, if she was truly IDB and not VDB (although I strongly suspect she volunteered and later regretted it, and/or she volunteered and wants to make a huge news story out of it for her own benefit).

geometry

it was not fake news. United spokesperson confirmed it with the Washington Post.(disclaimer: company also owned by Amazon owner Mr. Jeff Bezos)

It does make me wonder... I was involuntarily denied boarding due to overbooking, along with two other people on a SFO-NRT flight last September. I was gold and I believe the other two elderly women had no status. All we got were $800 voucher, hotel voucher and two free meals. How come we weren't offered $10,000 each?

chermorg

The Wash Post article does not confirm if it is IDB or VDB. United only confirmed: “yes, we issued” Preiss “this voucher per our policy.”

That article does change the story a bit, in it seems she had a DCA-AUS flight (connecting somewhere) that she switched to IAD-AUS direct due to weather waiver. This means she probably didn't buy the ticket the day before as the "nabbing the last seat on the flight" made me think originally. The story also confirms the woman denied the offered cash/check compensation willingly.

There is no story here - regardless of if it was technically IDB or VDB, the woman got what she was owed, and if she doesn't want to be subject to overbooking she can rent a private jet for herself.

jsloan

If you were involuntarily denied boarding on an ex-SFO flight, you were eligible for cash compensation instead. However, if you were actually involuntarily denied boarding as a Gold, then United likely broke about 6 rules (not laws, to be clear) in doing so.

The $10K voucher is not for IDB. It's for VDB. If she wanted cash instead of a voucher, it was her right, but the cash value would have been much less than $10K. Maybe she would have preferred that, but I can't imagine why. The voucher is transferrable and can be used multiple times. Even if she doesn't have a use for it personally, it could take care of her gift-giving needs for the entire year.

If she actually changed due to a weather waiver, as opposed to a cancelled flight, she has even less to complain about, since you normally can't change origins during a waiver. Sometimes, with UA, it seems that no good deeds go unpunished, and if UA is going to take negative press over this story, they're quite likely to reason that there's no point to do good deeds in the first place.