How The United Airlines CEO Should Have Handled The Incident

All companies face issues, and hindsight is 20/20 so let’s see what we can learn from the United Airlines overbooking situation.

The Situation

I am sure by now all of you guys have heard about or seen footage from the united airlines overbooking incident. To give a quick recap, basically United overbooked a flight from Chicago to Louisville and they needed to put 4 crew members on that full flight so they could work another flight at the destinations. They offered the passengers to voluntarily be bumped and offered them as much as $800 to do so.

However no one chose to be bumped to a flight the next day and it resulted in them choosing 4 passengers to be bumped without volunteering. This resulted in one passenger refusing and was physically removed and in the process was physically pulled from his seat and had his face smashed against an arm rest by Chicago aviation police causing him to bleed and was then dragged off the flight.

Now overbooking is common practice for airlines, it’s how they optimize seating. Knowing that not all passengers that book will show up, and basically an empty seat is a loss of revenue and no business wants that.

However I think this situation highlights some serious fault in that plan and policy as well a massive disconnect from reality for the United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz.

For starters, if you need to have staff in Louisville to work, you shouldn’t be flying them standby, and you should not be bumping your paying customers to accommodate your own logistic shortcomings. For me this underlines that the United Airlines CEO is not putting his customers first.

The second indicator of this lack of connection with the customer was his response where he basically said it was the customers fault for becoming disruptive and belligerent. And praised his employees for following the procedures they had in place.

Your Customers

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, without them you don’t have a business. So as the CEO or an as entrepreneur a lot of your energy is focused on strategic planning,  business development and of course customer acquisition.

If a customer decides to try your product or service and they have a bad experience they are not going to give you another shot. If they have a horrible experience where they are left not just inconvenienced but bloodied and injured and it’s witnessed and filmed by your other customers and then picked up by international news, you’re gonna lose a whole lot of customers because they now see how you are willing to treat them.

The Response

As the CEO, as the head of the business how you respond become vitally important, you have just a single chance to quell the situation, In this case it’s in full uproar. What the United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz did was to come out and basically blame the customers for what happened and did not in anyway acknowledge how bad the situation really was for someone who paid to be on this flight.

What he SHOULD HAVE done.

What the CEO should have done was own the situation. Double down on the fact that this should have never happened and he would do what needed to be done to fix it. He did the right thing by saying the employees were only following the procedures in place, but that was after he said the customer was at fault. The customer comes first, as the CEO you should know that. I don’t necessarily think the customer is always right, but as CEO it’s on you to make sure the policies and values of your company are there to ensure the customer is always taken care of, not inconvenience and certainly not beaten.

Take care of your customers, they are why you have a business. I think United Airlines needs to keep that in mind.

As always keep taking action and make your ideas reality.