VDOVault2's JumboTweets
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Why my very best friend (of `30 years) is my very best friend @united @RepublicAirline #flight3411 #DrDavidDao
Like many, I've been watching the ugliness of the public's reaction to
the ugly event by United's employees, right up to their CEO. I have
a range of thoughts.
To all airlines C-level folks:
Those customers you keep referring to? Those are people. Like you, or
those board members around you, or your family, or those workers on
the planes, or those workers buried in call centers, or the middle
managers you make resolve your conflicting policies, or the outsourced
workers you use to avoid paying benefits. The general public does not
believe you understand this, mostly from your herculean efforts to
give them less (less space, less service, less straightforwardness,
less dignity, less power, less voice, less choices) at any cost. At
some point, you have to draw a line at which you say, "this is not how
a person should be treated by anybody or any institution" and _never_
cross that line -- hopefully, because you actually give a damn, rather
just as a PR or legal concern. And don't try to weasel by drawing a
bunch of lines, rationalizing that interpretting one policy allows you
to stand on one side of a line, then interpretting another policy to
stand against a different line. Even better: give people a chance to
improve their lives for having used your service, rather than the
current feeling of dread that you'll have found a new way to define
"accomodate", because now you can make another $5 off them. There are
a lot of people making noises about how they feel unsafe after the
forced removal of passengers, but the feeling of lack of safety, and
the anger boiling over, is from this dehumanizing you've been engaging
in for several decades.
You can't treat customers as nothing more than terrible legalistic
obligations after you've gotten the money. You have angered people,
_earning_ terrible (frequently negative) approval ratings for your
industry as a whole, and that makes any sort of "easy" or "quick"
recovery impossible from any negative event of any magnitude, and it
blunts all positive events. If you hadn't spent so much effort over
such a long period of time making people feel cheated and abused, you
would have been able to write this off as a one-time awful event which
can be fixed by dealing with a few personnel, as opposed to undamming
the frustration and anger of millions of passenger miles all over your
corporate image. Note: calling all the passengers on your planes liars
when they witness truly bad events (cf. Munoz's responses during the
first 48 hours) was indefensible in the past, but now is undefendable.
Overbooking is a gamble, where you are the house (so says your 80+
page "ticket"). But it's clear the airlines don't want to pay off
losing bets. So you use the power of lawyers to take all the money,
and take away any voice of the people. If people are denied your
so-much-improved on-time performance, they stop placing the bets.
Which leads to...
Please stop pretending you're not manipulating the numbers for on-time
performance, cancellations, bounces, involuntary removals, customer
service failures, etc. Lying to yourself is amazingly foolish, and at
some point the public finds you untrustworthy. I know of a flight
where the passengers were told it wasn't going to fly, but the flight
explicitly wasn't cancelled, but it just wasn't going to fly. Your
statistics are suspect, at best, and far too likely... <<<<<< N.B from Jumbotweet: auto-truncated at 4K characters on index page - Click here or on the "view" link to see entire jumbotweet! http://www.jumbotweet.com/ltweets/view/179530