Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
Never sleep on United Airlines.
Barely a week goes by before one of its customers witnesses something that leaves them aghast.
This weekend, it was writer Julie Schwietert Collazo. She took to her Twitter account to present a photo.
It showed a young girl, legs tucked up in her airline seat, trying to sleep.
Collazo accompanied the image with these words: “So yeah, thanks, @united. Kid who slept straight up bc told empty seats next to her ‘cost ppl good money’ + a broken stroller. Good work.”
United has been all too good at costing itself a positive image by the behavior of some of its staff.
It may have all started with the dragging of bloodied Dr. David Dao off a plane, just because he saw no reason to give up his seat for a United Airlines employee.
But this has evolved to gate agents calling law enforcement on passengers who film them and flight attendants allegedly making passengers pee in their seats.
Collazo’s story, however, offers a comedy of myopia.
She told me that she was flying from New York to Portland, Oregon with her husband and three kids. They’re aged 2,3 and 7.
The United gate agent had been kind enough to move four of her party to row 12, even though they’d booked the infamous Basic Economy fares, which would have put them in row 35.
Still, her husband was left in row 35.
But then a woman got up from row 12 to sit elsewhere. So her husband thought he might now move up to sit with the rest of the family.
This didn’t sit well with a United flight attendant.
“She said he wasn’t allowed to sit there because people had paid good money for those seats,” Collazo told me of the flight attendant. A sum of $150 was mentioned.
So yeah, thanks, @united. Kid who slept straight up bc told empty seats next to her “cost ppl good money” + a broken stroller. Good work. pic.twitter.com/O4b5Fv4p1x
— collazoprojects (@collazoprojects) July 23, 2017
“Then the woman who’d left row 12 turned around and said: ‘I didn’t pay $150 extra for that seat,'” Collazo told me.
Yet the flight attendant doubled down on the supposed rules. So Collazo’s husband had to march back to row 35.
Collazo describes herself as “conflict-averse.” She told me she tried to reason with the flight attendant. The flight was, after all, less than half-full.
Yet the Friendly Skier not only wouldn’t budge, but then started to explain that they shouldn’t have put any luggage in the overhead lockers, as they’d only paid Basic Economy.
And so we come to the picture of the girl. It’s Collazo’s 7-year-old daughter.
“She’s in a row all by herself. She pulls her legs up under her chin and falls asleep,” Collazo told me. After the flight attendant’s rule-citing, her daughter was too scared to lie down across the other two seats.
Which is something flight attendants used to actually encourage passengers to do on emptier flights.
The timing of this couldn’t be more United-like.
Last week, the airline’s CEO Oscar Muñoz said that United had too many rigid rules. Then he uttered these insanely sensible words: “They don’t have to be rules.”
A touch of common sense and empathy can go a long way to creating loyalty. Rules merely create discomfort.
Why, then, was such a rule pointlessly enforced here? Who was harmed? Why would the airline not allow a family to sit together, when this would have inconvenienced precisely no one at all?
I contacted United to ask for its view and will update, should it reply.
Collazo said that United had been in touch with her and offered the family five $150 travel vouchers. Because every airline’s finest move when they mess up is to entice you to give it even more money.
“Where’s $150 going to take me? Syracuse?” Collazo said.
She also told me that when the family arrived in Portland, a stroller had been, in her words, “forcefully broken.”
The airline has, she said, offered $200 compensation for that, too.
But Collazo believes this isn’t really about her and her family.
“This is a systemic problem,” she said. “Even after all the heinous stuff, I’m not seeing an effort at organizational change.”
And then those inevitable words, ones that are so hard to keep because there’s still so little competition among airlines.
“What’s the point of the vouchers?” Collazo told me. “I don’t want to fly United again.”