mozilla

Apparently this occurred on Aug 7, 2019.

Travel waiver for the day: Travel Waiver: Northeast Severe Weather (August 6, 2019 - August 8, 2019) extended

hughw

Yes....the guy (or the person referred to by many of us as the "idiot") did a lot of things wrong, and most of us either know better, or our status helps us to resolve IRROPS better. But really, how is UA not to blame to some degree for not managing this better? Allowing a line to stretch out for 12 hours without anyone walking the line at frequent intervals to suggest options to standing in line (app, kiosks, etc)? Couldn't they have brought carts out with water and at least some minimal snacks, or handing out vouchers for the food court (and making sure places stayed open). Airports are huge with plenty of conditioned space....couldn't the airlines (or perhaps the operating authority, in this case the PANYNJ) have a plan to set up a "disaster area" with cots, blankets, food, etc. for those affected by IRROPS?

And UA, and all airlines, know exactly who is affected by IRROPS. They know where they are and where they're going. They have contact info. Shouldn't they be able with their vast computing power (don't make jokes about Shares) be able to optimize solutions for most affected travelers and communicate it to them clearly. And if that solution meant sleeping at the airport on a cot, they should make that part of the process. We all make fun of the kettles, but they're the ones that need help the most. Some may be extremely poor, some may be elderly, some may be travelers with little knowledge of English, and some might be your sons and daughters.

BB2220

Keeping with the context, when have you ever seen a line at an airport 12 hours long? He says he entered the line at 10pm for a hotel and remained in the line the entire night until 10am. You would think around the 4am mark an intellectually sound person would realize a hotel was no longer necessary.

The article is written by a shallow thinker, for consumption by other low mentality shallow thinkers.

narvik

I agree to a certain extent. Your points are valid, and food for thought.

The criticism in this thread is purely directed at the "writer" of the article, as it's a pathetic whine from beginning to end.

What I am always surprised about in these situations is that the affected persons are never capable of helping themselves; there is ALWAYS the reliance of the "man" or the "company" or the "government" to provide for them.
Just imagine how cool this story could have been, if some of the 400 people waiting in line would have organized help to themselves, and provided information and possibly water, snacks, etc. to those waiting?
Did ANYONE actually ask UA or airport staff to provide water?

We are simply TERRIBLE at helping ourselves, and are completely reliant on someone else taking care of our most basic needs, or so it seems.

halls120

In order to prevent 12 hour long lines and phone waits for hours requires more employees. If UA hired and trained more staff, sure, they would be better able to cope with IRROPS. And before long, they would be back in bankruptcy, because their business model can't support more employees, because more employees means higher fares, and passengers aren't willing to pay more.

As far as utilizing their "vast computing power," the very nature of IRROPS means they aren't going to be able to optimize solutions for most affected travelers and communicate it to them clearly. On more than one occasion during IRROPS, I've had three different systems tell me my flight is at 3 different gate - a text telling me the flight is at one gate, the app telling me it's at a second gate, and the airport sign board telling me that it is at a third gate. UA doesn't own all the systems at an airport, and expecting Mr. Chicken to solve everyone's problems is sometime in the future. Not today.

We get the service we get because that's the service we are willing to pay for.

Often1

Don't ignore the fact that the writer was warned and nonetheless rebooked OA from another airport in fairly short order. The rest of the writer's misery, e.g. waiting in a 12-hour line for a voucher which he had already been told he would not get, was self-inflicted and I am not sure what more staffing would have done for him.

hughw

I don't think that it's asking to much to ask various systems to talk to each other regarding your example of text, app, and airport sign. If you have the systems at all, they need to, and should, be integrated. This, to me, is more a problem of lack of thought, than money.

As to optimizing solutions for (most) affected travelers and communicating it to them clearly, why not? There's a finite number of travelers and a finite (though extremely large) number of flights and combinations of flights that need to be processed. Waze manages in real time to process and continually update solutions for tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of drivers going to tens of thousands of locations by almost an infinite variety of routes. Is it so beyond an airline's IT capability that they couldn't optimizes a variety of alternatives for each and every passenger? Obviously, some solutions will not work for some travelers, but if they can come up with solutions for a significant number, then the remains number that need personalized help would be much more manageable.

findark

A lot of the time, alternate solutions are presented in IRROPS.

But also you're probably talking a 3x to 4x difference in total compensation for the employees maintaining the systems you are comparing

zoned_post_meridiem

Of course -- I think of it more as a bonus, rather than the reason for carrying a card with an annual fee.

narvik

By the way, I'm pretty sure this is how this article even got published in the first place:


Editor's meeting:

"It's Thanksgiving; we have to print a travel related story!"

"Sorry, we don't have anything like that."

"Well, then go look in the garbage bin for articles about horrendous travel experiences that we rejected this year. Pick one out, and make sure to add a paragraph that references Thanksgiving Day travel.
ANY story will do, it doesn't matter if it isn't any good! We go to print in two hours."

zombietooth

There is really no realistic way to integrate the flight traffic control and revenue/inventory management systems. There are just too many different systems (i.e. FAA, different airlines' RM and PM, etc.) For instance, when a flight is delayed, UA will often give significantly different estimates of revised departure times than FlightAware. In fact, I've seen flights that were shown as cancelled on FA but still listed as on-time on the UA App. How can this be possible given the same data sets? The truth is that they must be either processing the data differently, or there are actually different sets of data going to the airline's systems and the FA systems (which I believe gather their data from the FAA ATC system). In addition, rebooking often requires waivers of fare rule restrictions and authorizations to release compensation, etc. Those decisions really can't be made in advance by some sentient computer system.

In addition, why should UA universally plan reroutes for all affected pax, when a large subset will be making decisions e.g. canceling for "trip in vain" reasons, or taking a rental car or other public transportation instead? Passengers who are wisely proactive and find their own solutions obviously reduce the workload on the UA staff.

WAZE fails too and does a horrible job sometimes for me in LA and Orange County, and I find that my knowledge of the roads often works better.

HNLbasedFlyer

Perhaps controversial on this thread - My opinion of a 12 hour line happening is 0%. I just don't believe it.

A 2-3 hour line (which is very long) I could buy into - 12, no way. Seems made up.

cjermain

No one can blame UA for weather. That's silly.

The larger problem is lack of CSRs and especially, very high load factors. It takes three days to recover from a weather event because there is no spare capacity. But while UA (and the other airlines) have actively decided to have sky-high load factors and thus no spare capacity to deal with anything out of the ordinary, it's difficult to blame them. It appears the flying public cares about price first, and everything else is a distant second. If UA flew more frequently but asked 30% more for its tickets to pay for the resulting empty seats, they'd end up going bankrupt. No one would pay. And while one might argue that's how it used to be back in the days when the industry was regulated, there are few people seriously arguing that we turn back the clock. Competition has made flying affordable for a lot of people.

bart889

It's like the old adage: you can have it good, fast and cheap. Pick two.

What you say about spare capacity is something I think the average J.Q. Public does not think about, or understand too well. I used to work in the power industry, where we have massively important issues around excess capacity, how much in needed, and most importantly, how does it get paid for? People in North America have come to expect their electricity to be 100% reliable, but this reliability (especially during extreme weather conditions) comes at a cost. Many of the same issues present themselves in the air travel business.

manacit

Nothing I'll say hasn't been said, but this is article reads like something that might have a good point, but it's worthless because it does a poor job of explaining it. Launching into a tirade about corporate greed and the terrible nature of post-deregulation flying will fall on deaf ears when you've repeatedly failed to hold up your end of the bargain.

The feeling of helplessness is a very real part of flying, but you can't always be the victim: set an alarm to give yourself enough time to be at the gate at least 15 minutes before boarding (and yes, that can change!), when an airline warns you about weather, try to book around it, believe the phone customer service and don't wait in a 400-long line of people to hope for a different answer.

At the end of the day, Plane travel for people who aren't frequent fliers and don't know the rules can be difficult - if you've gone to this forum a handful of times, you likely know more than 90% of people that will ever get into an airline in the USA this year. It shouldn't need to be down to reading the fine print and knowing when to HUACA to get treated "right". But, you have to hold up your end of the deal. United is not going to give you a wakeup call to make sure you leave for the airport on time.

The most bothersome part of this column to me is the baseless attacks on United - that they wouldn't staff more CSRs when IRROPS happen, that overbooking is the reason there wasn't a seat available on every flight for someone who should have woken up and made the flight that they were already booked on. You have to know how the system works to be able to complain about parts of the system.

It bears mentioning that all of the free-marketed things this article dislikes is the reason that air travel is affordable by many in the first place. If it was 2-3x as expensive to fly, would they even be able to in the first place?