Originally Posted by
TQ Nola
Another 'there but for the grace of God goes my company' fiasco.
We all know that on any given day the Facebook crowd could crucify any given airline for something. This time it's United. You'll be pithed and dissected for a week or two until the corporate organism moves on to some other story. It's what people and the press do.
I'm not anti press. They serve a valuable function. But how many times has each of us read some airline story and not found twelve different things wrong with it, and then blithely gone on to swallow every detail of some other story about something we're not experts about? Happens all the time, and you should be aware of it. Reporters are fallible people, made more fallible because of the time constraints their craft has to work with.
I'm not saying there wasn't a wrong here that should be made right. Again: not anti press. But in the digital era nobody takes time out to separate fact from fantasy. Grains of salt are in short supply.
Outstanding post. CNBC's hanging onto this story today because earnings come out after today's market close.
SNL got in a couple of United jokes, but they're getting pretty stale. And Colin Jost's joke was spot on. Something like, "I'll never fly United again. (dramatic pause) Unless they're the lowest fare."
We're overselling flights because we're not charging enough in fares. Raise fares and dump basic economy fares. Basic economy is a stupid idea when the flights are already full. If there's anything we should be mad at management about, it's that we're not charging enough for tickets and leaving a ton of money on the table.
Yesterday, I was on 3 United flights.
Leg 1: Had to jumpseat because the flight was full.
Leg 2: 97% full 777 with
104 FFs on the upgrade list to F. That's 30% of coach that were UA silver or better.
Leg 3: DH on full flight. Yes, my DH was booked more than 24 hrs in advance.
Summer's not even here yet and our flights are packed; there are more people flying than ever. Time to raise our prices. Sell less tickets in the lowest fare buckets and move them to the top fare buckets. This is going to be a long, brutal summer in the airline business with every aircraft full.
Stop the hysteria. There's very little difference between United and American or Delta. We're not better than them and we're not worse than them. On any given flight, one would experience near identical treatment no matter which of the 3 carriers they fly.
As far as the media bias against United, we're just the flavor of the week. They're already getting back to 24 hour Trump coverage.