blonde poker forum

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EW60r5bWCk

Think they're going to be dishing out a fair bit of compo for that.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/aliciamelvillesmith/a-man-was-dragged-off-united-plane-after-the-airline?utm_term=.sfw93KY9zq#.qy8J6zQJvo

Ridiculous, they usually just offer money/vouchers and the price goes up until someone accepts....

+1  I got offered £850 cash to jump off a vegas flight in 2011 and a first class seat on the same flight tomorrow with an overnight stay at the hilton to sweeten it.  I couldn't get off quick enough incase someone else jumped off before me.  I find it amazing a firm this big globally operated this heavy handed for such tiny financial gain.  Must be a wind up surely?  The negative PR must be worth £100k+ to them long term.  Makes no sense at all.  Where do they get the bouncers from at the airport to just drag people off the plane in this style?

Only once got offered when I could accept and didn't have to be somewhere, was a similar amount to you and was gutted when they didn't pick me!

Supposedly offered everyone $800 but nobody would move so they 'randomly picked' people, including this doctor who had patients he needed to get back to and therefore didn't want to go. So they knocked him out

Where do the heavies come from at the airport to 'knock people out'? Are they just sitting waiting somewhere to perform this duty?

They rang the police or something to escort people off
Can't remember what I read
It's all over Reddit front page

Arsenal are looking at getting these boys in to remove Wenger  ;scarymoment;

haha

in all seriousness do they do a random draw in public to evict punters? 

If it was RyanAir they would have charged to drag him.

Randomly picked people on their computer
Will be whoever paid the least for their flights

Surprised there was only 2 takers (they had oversold by 4 seats apparently) for the $800 and a night in a hotel. Obv there would have been plenty of people onboard with commitments of a varying nature that meant they needed that flight, but on a plane full of people you'd assume at least a further 2 people would be content enough to skip the flight and pocket the cash, especially as it was a domestic sector within the States.

Couple of grand max extra out of their pockets v PR nightmare, I can't believe someone ordered them to remove the people, their job is gone first thing tomorrow...

Is that seriously how they work it?  Budget boys get booted first?  Makes sense from a business angle.  You wouldn't want to boot a guy who had just paid top dollar 6 hours before the flight to fly last minute.  Still incredibly harsh PR wise.  Surely you just up the ante with bribes until someone bites to get off and avoid the bad PR?  How often does this style of 'boot off' happen?  Surely never happens otherwise it would be on SM all the time right?

Why don't they just operate a policy of the last 2 to check in get booted off?  Would speed up the take off process if people knew this.  Last minute check in types wouldn't be getting pissed so often in the bar if this was the policy.

Can't imagine it would have been totally random; guessing there would have been at least a few frequent fliers/VIP customers on board and these people probably would have been immune from selection. It might have been random from a pool of passengers who United Airlines felt were fair game to remove?

Yeah its a massive own goal from them. It went from $400 (no takers) to $800 (2 takers), but then instead of offering more they got the heavies involved it seems. Whilst overbooking is prevalent, I've never seen anyone forcibly removed from an aircraft like that.

America; land of the free.

Had two muppets doing this on the way back from Tenerife after Cheltenham. Was the flight before mine, and they had to move mine to another gate, because this dopey bird and her boyfriend were plotted up in the bar.

Best thing was, it was being piped every two minutes from the gate, and the bar was less than 20 yards away.

There's something we are not being told.

Airlines know whether a flight is oversold way before everybody gets to the gate, let alone gets to their seats on the aircraft.

The editorial mentions that they had to accommodate 4 airline personnel, therefore 4 paying passengers had to come off. This "positioning crew" are also known in advance, and are taken into account usually before the gate opens, so that if people have to come off, they are held at the gate.

Seems like the Flight Management Unit screwed up in this instance.

All airlines have their own policies in terms of how they get the "oversolds" off the flight. I can't speak for United, but other airlines will take people off based strictly on the cost of the fare - so be careful when you use your airmiles, or pay for Handluggage Only tickets if you really need to get to where you want to on the day you want. But in any event, this kind of thing (people being forcibly removed) would never happen here in the UK unless they were being aggressive or disruptive.

If they boot off the people that paid the least, they have to compensate less. Supposedly 4x what the they paid for flight in usa

Drag an old guy off by his legs, and pay 4000x.

You're not wrong there. I had the pleasure of a London > Ibiza Sleazyjet evening flight in September and the Police were called onto the flight to remove three passengers. After what seemed like an age of negotiations, ONE of the lads was booted off. Then some more talk and the rest were left there. I couldn't believe they didn't just yank them all off straight away on the stewards' say so.

I couldn't believe when I heard this story and am disgusted that they forcibly removed this customer from their plane. I hope United Airlines goes bust over this, and wouldn't be shocked if it happens.

why do airlines overbook?

Because there is always a certain number of no shows, and they know this,  they use it to max profits. When they get it wrong people are usually quick to take the £££.

Exactly that.

And the optimised revenue, even at, say, 5%, can be the difference between profit & loss. 

This wasn't really overbooking.  They threw off seated passengers to make way for their staff for operational reasons.

The CEO said

Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this," the Associated Press quoted the email as saying.

"While I deeply regret this situation arose, I also emphatically stand behind all of you, and I want to commend you for continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right."

WAC

The airlines license should be revoked until they amend their procedures.

2000+ post thread here, has a good summary in the Wiki at the top:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-airlines-mileageplus/1835638-man-pulled-off-overbooked-flight-ua3411-ord-sdf-9-april-2017-a.html

Aviation Security Officers... These are the guys who man the security scanning processes at US airports. I've rarely met one who's had the benefit of customer service training. Standard approach is that everyone's a potential threat rather than trying to do their vital job whilst making travellers feel that it's simply an essential (if inconvenient) part of the air travel routine.

I must say that, having read the summary that Longines provided the link to, I do feel a little sorry for United.

Their part of this cock-up was the mis-management of the re-positioning crew's seating. All of this should have been dealt with before all the commercial passengers were allowed onto the aircraft. However, they got 3 of their volunteers by using the cash offer before encountering this guy who allegedly became increasingly belligerent and abusive. What's not their fault is the way in which the Aviation Security Officers chose to deal with the passenger, but they're getting the full blame for it.

It is four and a half hours by car.  Shove the crew in a taxi if it is already fully boarded.  Seems stupid to delay the flight in the first place, never mind what happened after.

I think the contract between the airlines and unions/flight crew prohibits this otherwise they'd be doing it for lots of 'short' hops in the US.

the crew seating could of been air marshalls rather than pilots and cabin crew

Jeez, that thread on flyertalk is 156 pages long already!

Pretty brutal for United the next time this situation comes up

How much do they pay to avoid the next video?

You reckon they pay up if every passenger on the plane holds out for 5k?

Serves them right for being cheap capping compensation offers at $1k

It could have, but it wasn't.


Airline employees f-cked up, so airline employees sort it out.

Saw that and closed it when I got to the bottom of the page.

One rabbithole I don't have the time to go down.

should bring in a law to stop overbooking

(https://i.redd.it/ksayfl7wvwqy.png)

All well and good but ticket prices would go up if you are happy to accept that....

I think the US equivalent of Martin Lewis fanboys love the overbooking thing, I've got a mate who always volunteers for it, then just dicks around on his laptop for 5 hours, and gets his next holiday travel paid for. Him and his Mrs got $1,600 of airline credit for waiting 4 hours last year and it paid for most of his holiday.

100% I would do it if I didn't have to be back at work which is usually the case.

Bonus point if Mr Crater can recognize the venue.

Yep, there are discussion threads all over Flyertalk regarding V(oluntary) Denied Boarding and I(nvoluntary) Denied Boarding, can be very lucrative - this is a typical example for a 2.5 hour flight from Chicago to Orlando:

3/27 -- ORD-MCO, UA654 @ 6AM. Needed two volunteers. Gate agent comes on, offers $1,000 and F seats on the 11:15 AM flight. No takers.
10 minutes later, supervisor comes on board. Offers $1,500 and F seats on the 7:30AM flight (next flight out). So many call buttons, it sounded like a high-density 777.
If I didn't have wife and kids, I would've taken it. As it is, I half-thought about pulling one kid and taking it.

I got so lucky in the mid 90's flying from Inverness to Heathrow with BA.

I was on a business trip, my company had paid the full fare and I needed to make the flight so was a tad concerned when I arrive at the check in desk (last to check in) and told the flight was full and was asked if I could wait for the next some 3 1/2 hours later with the compensation of a free ticket.

As I needed to fly the answer was a polite no with trepidation as it was the first time it had happened to me. The ground crew checked my ticket and then began discussing who they could take off such as lower paid fares or as it happened one of the airport service crew who had a freebie and was waiting to board but chatting to his friends at the desk.

A few years earlier a friend had been in a similar situation and was offered the 'dickie seat' behind the pilot on a flight from Manchester to Heathrow.

So I rather optimistically asked if I could fly down in the 'dickie seat' and save them shoving someone else off, although I felt if this happened they would surely give it to the airport service guy.

However, they had a chat spoke to the Captain and after what was a brief description of myself and circumstances they offered me the dickie seat and I snapped it up, obviously nothing like this would happen nowadays.

The next 2 hours or so was an experience I will never forget from turning left at the cabin door at Inverness and soaring off over the Moray Firth to landing at Heathrow with the 1st officer landing fully manually (seemingly the craft a 737 could land virtually on auto or so I seemed to recollect him telling me) and in a way it was just like a computer flying game.

Most of the flight was in the clouds and apart from regular checks it seemed very non-descript with both pilots saying they preferred flights less than 4 hours duration and we chatted mostly about golf as I felt a tad awkward asking tekky questions.

Anyway, that wasnt my only experience of being bumped off and after one event which caused me to miss a direct flight from Heathrow to Inverness I was assisted by the check in crew to get a flight from Heathrow/Glasgow/Inverness which I received compensation for and only delayed by about an hour and half.

So Im a bit confused as to how this airline got it so wrong as its a common experience.

The dude is a confirmed poker player btw http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=78128&_ga=1.238856832.1026347048.1466854393#

That escalated quickly.  Now his previous convictions are listed in the NY Post and elsewhere.

I made it to about page 29 on that thread on Flyertalk whilst at work earlier, dread to think how long it will be by 9am tomorrow! I'm an aviation geek so do enjoy browsing over there :)

How much regret from UA that they didn't just flash more compo and get passengers lured by the $$$ off the flight without being dragged? Their shares have already taken a sizeable dip, and the company is being blasted from all corners. Perhaps could have been avoided had they increased the offer above $800.....could potentially cost them millions and millions going forwards.

Just saw this on TV, seems appropriate and very funny....  ;D

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0GW0Vnr9Yc

 :)

:D

this is fascinating

"It’s time for some game theory, United Airlines edition"

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/who-gets-bumped.html

Absolutely no idea where this was.

The only clue is it's my first ipod, so I guess around 2006?

A poker table right next to a bar. Looks like heaven.

Well, the shit table always gives it a chance of being Napoleons Owlerton, though my gut instinct is it is 'Barry's' in Birmingham just from looking at it.

Ash tray on the table lends credence to the Naps theory.

They were one of the last to abolish smoking in the cardroom IIRC.

Never heard of Barrys, let alone played there. So seems unlikely that's the answer.

It was awesome, they gave you trifle and stuff. The least intimidating poker speakeasy ever.

Yeah I think its naps, hence Teeks asking me, being the 'other' Barry from Sheffield and all.

Naps @ Owlerton, yes.

Clues are the mug (with a saucer....), the chips (they had a 200 denom tournament chip) & the table without a rail.

It was the 2006 Summer Festival I believe.



Proper little rogues gallery here;

http://www.aworldofpoker.com/eventpics.php?eventname=Summer+Festival&casinoid=5&date=2005-08

Given the way this case is going, it looks like Dr Dao and his family are going to be financially secure for the rest of their lives.

Apparently he was more scared on that United flight than when he was forced to flee Saigon in the face of the advancing Viet Cong. Somehow I don't think the VC were planning on anything pleasant for him, but this story is now entering a new level.

The American Dream can be achieved in lots of different ways. I think I'd take a punch in the face & be dragged of a flight in return for the rewards coming his way.

There is no case yet, just a lawyer and a dream.

Rightly fucking so.

I doubt this case will ever reach the courts; there'll be a settlement. United have already accepted responsibility. Just a matter of how much. I'd be surprised if the figures had less than 7 numbers.

Btw, I'm not suggesting that it isn't warranted or deserved. I'm just observing the facts and speculating on the outcome.

after they get claim in on UA they will have daily mail online in the dock for liable

The amount of flights that don't have any volunteers to be bumped to the next flight for $$$ is going to go up exponentially.