This quote is telling: "When I was a outsourced regional jet captain operating United Express flights between 2010 and 2014 the gate agents in charge of the regional (out-sourced) flights at United hub, Washington-Dulles, were third-party contractors. They were horribly trained and frequently surly. The gates were always crowded, everyone there was angry, nothing worked, it was utter chaos and misery. I absolutely dreaded flying there and did my best to avoid it, Chicago was only a little better."
"I really don’t think the upper management at United has any clue about the nuts and bolts, day to day, inner workings of the company. Post-merger United is too big to fail, too big to manage and far too Balkanized to govern. I fully expect the ugliness to continue at United."
I'm only arguing the supposition that United is a uniquely bad company.
Many other bad companies (that keep United from being unique) haven't stumbled in such a harmful, public way. United did, and we consumers need to make an example out of them.
(Edit: grammar).
This is the kind of problem a company can get into when the people making the key decisions operate in terms of "metrics" that don't track reality well enough. Plus when a lot of the work is done by outsourced vendors, they probably don't pass on unquantifiable bad news.
This also played a role in United's frankly abysmal on-time ratings; in order to have enough capacity while moving everything into tiny regional jets, they had to raise the frequency of the flights, which led to logistical clusterfucks at their hubs when they just overloaded the ability of the airport operations to handle that many flights.
Smisek did do it with the long-range 757s he gained in the Continental merger. Smaller plane, less crew...and just enough range to get back if the headwinds are light. If not, it's an unscheduled 90 minute refuel in Canada. Add the time to clear immigration and customs, and now you have 200+ people with a missed connection.
http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=699955
I've had it happen to me, it's not fun.
Meanwhile, airlines are also looking at Airbus, which is talking up a long-range variant of the A321neo for exactly this purpose.
Hitting paying customer head on the armrest until he lost consciousness? I think no. I hope you don't believe "he fell" united version, because that's literally impossible in the economy seats. I may eventually come to terms with the loss of several hundreds dollars (or 1-2 thousand, due to lost car and hotel reservations) but concussion is inexcusable offense for me. I won't tolerate that ever.
That said, I and my family decided over a year ago never to fly United again, based on multiple bad experiences. Independent of this incident, I'm sure we made a good decision.
That doesn't excuse them. All American airlines suck. That problem should be fixed.
You don't think you'd be able to dredge up similarly bad stories for any other airline?
Look, what United did on that flight was pretty awful. But the rest of this to me smacks of the typical rumor mill that spins up when a company has bad PR, which surfaces the typical sort of 2-deviations-below-the-bell-curve scenarios you'll occasionally have when you're a company at United's scale - a scale that employs tens of thousands of people that do not actually all act as one giant United hive mind as much as we'd like them to but rather each as autonomous people that can occasionally do wrong things in a way that has no bearing on the company at large.
(That was a pretty long sentence.)
For what it's worth, I know an employee of United who loves it. But what was that saying about the plural of anecdote again..?