I do not blame passengers for carrying on bags that could be checked. United charges $35 to check a bag that is free if it fits in overhead. I have a feeling that the musician did not know about the carry on bin use with her ticket because it’s hidden in small print. I did not know that option existed until this article. For this life of me, I cannot figure out why people fly United when Southwest treats people so much better.
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Maybe she couldn’t get an appointment right away since he’s a “top surgeon”? Or she has to travel to see him because she lives in a small area without a good selection of orthopedic surgeons?
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Nope. It’s because the story is bullshit. Only explanation.
For scientists, too.
Suddenly you not only couldn’t ship specimens by air, but if you tried, the airports would destroy and/or contaminate them. It used to be routine to ship special padded crates full of water samples in hundreds of individual test tubes.
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The last time I broke my hand, it took me at least a week to get an appointment with any kind of orthopedist. They put a splint on in the emergency room, but that’s all they can do immediately in most cases.
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The fiddle and the violin are very similar, the main difference is about 40 IQ points.
Look, that’s just how it works a lot of the time for getting into surgery. It’s not like on TV where your surgeon immediately runs to the hospital. It’s not a life threatening injury, but it could be career threatening. That means the surgeon books her in during the next few days to a week.
You seem to be bending over backwards to say that United was in the right, but with their tack record lately I’d but my belief in the veracity of the traveler.
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[quote=“ethicalcannibal, post:28, topic:102312”]
Look, that’s just how it works a lot of the time for getting into surgery. It’s not like on TV where your surgeon immediately runs to the hospital. It’s not a life threatening injury, but it could be career threatening. That means the surgeon books her in during the next few days to a week. [/quote]
So she might have a career threatening injury so she goes ahead and continues playing her regularly scheduled concerts?
Correia was supposed to have flown out Sunday to join the Missouri Symphony Orchestra to play for the summer season.
She said she will now fly to St. Louis on Tuesday on board another air carrier.
um, no…I’m trying to say that only one side of the story has been presented and it’s very sensationalized. I tend not to believe everything a lawyer says as gospel. I also don’t like to rush to judgement without the facts.
However this does not appear to be a popular position here so please, bash away.
As presented here, my first thought was that the ‘supervisor’ was a fake and it was an attempt to steal the violin. Other data may contradict that.
The economy ticket explanation may simply be that she didn’t buy the ticket, the MSO or their agent did.
Something got screwed up, and in this case the fact that it was a United flight, with their recent debacles, tends to make people think the problem is them.
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I often try to play devil’s advocate even if i don’t agree with a given side. So i get you on why you’re questioning what the lawyer is saying vs siding with him (and everyone) in bashing the airline.
There is a degree of spin here from the lawyer. To me the whole situation reads like both parties bare some blame for escalating the situation but ultimately the ticketing agent was the one with the power and that makes them responsible for what happened. I could be wrong though, i am not a lawyer.
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This.
I know some people who were “asked” to open their test tubes containing air samples.
I also know people who had to check in a device for measuring plant vessel conductivity. Sadly, the official documents of the device label it as a “pressure bomb”.
I personally had a lot of fun travelling with a refractometer for measuring nectar sugar content. It looks a bit like a sniper’s scope. My other stuff usually got screened twice, and swiped for a gc/ms. (I usually told them I would like to see the gc/ms output, and they usually refused.)
But never, ever, did someone get physical on me when I refused to let something be taken away.
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If you’re an evil sociopath, why not put together a fake United-supervisor costume and hang around at airports looking for excuses to hassle and demean people at random? Who would know the difference?
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Do you think she gets paid a salary?
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I will attest to this. I broke my leg (displaced fracture) and the soonest I got in to see a surgeon was five days, even with the x-ray. The surgeon booked me for surgery the next day, however.
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I have had the flight attendents do the thing where they just grab the bag out of your hands, and say they need to check it. I think it is a strategy devised so that they don’t have to waste their time with interacting and negotiating with passengers. I have to assume that most people will just submit, like I did.
In my case, the bag they grabbed had items critical to my trip. When I got to Dubai, my bag was not on the plane. So there was no point to taking the next leg of the trip. I sat in a hotel in Dubai for weeks while my Dad worked the phone trying to track down my bag. he finally located it in Amsterdam, which was not on my route. Anyone less persistent would never have found it.
I just can’t agree with those here that argue that she had a class of seat where she should not have expected to put anything under the seat in front of her or in the overhead. Many of us have employers who arrange our flights. We get what we get. Most of the time, I don’t even know my destination until I get to the airport.
If the airlines are developing classes of seats where any reasonable person would have to pay for an upgrade to endure the experience, they have a problem with their business model. Especially in an era with low fuel prices.
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Yes, a calm discourse is bashing. Right. How did I miss it.
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I’m in total agreement that the employee had the power to produce a different outcome but chose not to. Front line employees are always ultimately responsible for customer satisfaction outcome. But I don’t automatically assume malice without supporting evidence.
I’m stopping short of believing that the “assault” occurred not because I believe it’s not possible but Occam’s Razor says the accounts as presented by the financially motivated attorney tends to discredit the events playing out exactly as portrayed. United is on the ropes PR-wise and every 2-bit shyster is on the lookout for million dollar payouts right now.
I also fly a lot - mostly United because of where I live - and in the million+ miles I’ve flown with them I have never witnessed any event that comes close to supporting the position that the entire company is overtly hostile to its customers. At least this is in no way unique to United. There are always bad apples with any large company and you won’t find American or Delta any better or worse. These events are indicative of the larger US airline industry climate and the result of increased consolidation and loose regulatory environment that encourages profits over customer service in general.
As an aside - I’ve also noticed a distinct “piling on” attitude lately here on BBS which do not like at all. It used to be reasonable debates and discussing controversial topics were encouraged. Now anyone who holds a contrary opinion tends to get buried and muted. We need to check our biases - we wouldn’t blindly accept a sensationalized headline from an unknown news site on topics like politics or science but we seem to jump on these kinds of reports without questioning the source or digging deeper.
My apologies. I’m tired of defending myself on this topic. I’m out
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Definitely smaller than a bag of golf clubs!
Back when Yo-Yo Ma wasn’t yet hugely famous, he worked out a deal with British Airways: he would reserve two seats next to each other. If the plan was not fully booked (yes, kids, in fact there used to be at least a couple of empty seats on most flights) then he only paid for the seat he himself sat in, but if it was fully booked, he would pay for the second seat as well.
Customer service used to exist.
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You can safely take a 17th C violin on Southwest, I bet… If you can get past the TSA to get in and out of the plane, anyway.
Southwest cheerfully let me check a duffel bag full of medieval armor and a golf bag full of weapons. The TSA was not so blithe about it, but I managed to escape them eventually.
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