United faces fiasco over dragged passenger
United is getting pummeled on latenight TV. Online, jokers are proposing new corporate slogans such as “We’ll drag you all over the world” and “We have red eye and black eye flights available.” On Wall Street, the airline briefly lost nearly $1 billion in market value before its stock regained much of the loss.
Cellphone videos of airport police yanking a 69-year-old passenger out of his seat and dragging him down the aisle have become a public-relations nightmare for United. Travel and PR experts say the airline fumbled the situation from the start and made matters worse with a tone-deaf apology from the CEO.
It’s too soon to know whether Sunday night’s incident at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport will cause lasting harm. United frequent flyers won’t easily give up their miles. Many travelers aren’t attached to a particular airline and just take the cheapest fare.
Then again, there are those videos. “That is the craziest act I’ve ever seen. Who drags a ticketed passenger
off an airplane?” said Bruce Rubin, a longtime practitioner of crisis public relations in Miami. “Because it’s so visual and it’s so unnecessary, it’s the kind of thing that can hurt United long term.”
Lawyers for the passenger in the videos, David Dao, a doctor from Elizabethtown, Ky., said Tuesday he was being treated in a Chicago hospital. They gave no further details on his injuries.
Just two weeks ago, United was at the center of another PR furor after a gate agent in Denver barred two girls from boarding a flight because they were wearing leggings.
United CEO Oscar Munoz apologized on Monday for the latest incident but also blamed the passenger for not obeying when airline employees asked him to leave. Munoz called the man “disruptive and belligerent.”
On Tuesday, Munoz offered a stronger mea culpa for the “truly horrific event,” saying, “No one should ever be mistreated this way.” He promised a review of airline policies by April 30 and vowed to “fix what’s broken so this never happens again.”
Jim Corridore, an airline analyst for CFRA Research, said after “poorly handling a PR disaster,” United’s CEO “is finally saying the right things.”
Dao and three other passengers had been told to give up their seats so that four employees of the company operating the flight for United could board. Dao was the only one to refuse.
To make room on the plane, United had tried to entice volunteers with travel vouchers worth $800 and a hotel room. When there were no takers, a United manager went on board and announced four people would be removed.
Big mistake, say the crisis-management experts. Everyone wondered why United didn’t simply sweeten the offer until four passengers agreed to get off.
“A few dollars could have solved this problem,” said Allen Adamson, founder of Brand Simple Consulting in New York. “Instead, the damage of the brand will be millions of dollars.”
United said passengers were already seated when the four employees of Republic Airline showed up at the gate and insisted on boarding the plane to Louisville, Ky., so they could operate a flight the next morning.
United is “within their rights to take someone off the plane, but this problem is totally the creation of United,” said Charles Leocha, a passenger-rights advocate in Washington. “For them to wait after the [passengers] boarded before they say, ‘Sorry, you have to get off’” is inexcusable.