United Airlines - Why They're Hated

[Music] this is my series on the most hated companies I want to make it clear right in the beginning that I'm not taking a random company and trying to find every little thing that's wrong with them I am taking a generally hated company and trying to find some reasons behind that hate United Airlines has one of the worst reputations out there USA Today place them on their list of America's top 20 most hated companies and I've seen them on any other lists as well so today I want to explore and explain where all that hatred comes from United Airlines goes back to the 1930s and like many others what we have today is a result of a long history of mergers and acquisitions in the beginning they formed as a result of Boeing and three others combining their air businesses together to form a single I guess you could say United business notably in 1961 they bought capital airlines making them the largest airline in the country at the time six years later that became the first airline to surpass 1 billion dollars in revenue than in 1985 when Pan Am was in trouble they started buying all these major routes from them that year they bought all the ones going to Asia for 750 million dollars then in 1991 they continued when they bought six of their London routes for 400 million and a part of their latin-american operations for 135 million just doing some math here they spent well over a billion dollars to scoop up all these assets from a failing competitor as recent as 2010 and they merged with Continental Airlines and a 3.2 billion dollar deal that again at the time created the largest airline in the world with that one they kept the name United but they did adopt the Continental logo now there's an obvious component to this United Airlines is an airline which already tends to be one of the more disliked industries we can go through all the typical stand-up comedian type complaints about them waiting for flights cancelled flights overbooked flights the hassle and fees of checking bags and the legroom in the food and the peanuts and the list is endless some of that stuff may be worse or more frequent when it comes to United Airlines but you see it everywhere my simplest way to explain that over the last couple of decades anyway it's a simple lack of competition when there's fewer options for the customer to choose from the companies don't have to work as hard to attract those customers when it comes to Airlines in the United States before the 1970s it used to be really non-competitive but then the airline deregulation Act of 1978 allowed more competition moving ahead to the early 2000s that competition was brought back down the 9/11 attacks a poor economy combined with other factors caused many of these airlines to decline and file for bankruptcy United was actually one of them they filed for bankruptcy in 2002 but they did come back from it however many others didn't and ended up being combined into other airlines so after that instead of a bunch of small companies we had a few large ones not unlike the t1000 from Terminator 2 at the industry was split into pieces and then morphed back together today is something like two-thirds of the market is controlled by the top four companies and United is one of those top four so consolidation has decreased competition and that's the basic reason behind the generally poor service but even among a disliked industry United Airlines stands out as being exceptionally worse than the others the ACSI they survey customers to put together this ranking of how satisfy their with different companies they call it the customer satisfaction index and over the years United Airlines has not performed well some years they're actually ranked at the very bottom but consistently for over twenty years now they've always scored lower than the benchmark of the industry meaning that United customers are generally not happy with them so the question is still why do they stand out in this negative way I think a big reason for it is the employees over the years not to say they're bad people I'm not trying to attack that eighty to ninety thousand people working there each year but they've had their own issues with the company there's many ways that can translate to poor customer service and unhappy customers the big one that stands out is in 1994 United Airlines became 55% owned by their employees they were the largest company to ever do it and it sounds good in theory the main idea behind it was that they would be closer tied to the success of the company sort of a pride in ownership kind of thing if you did your job well that would reflect well on the company their value would increase and you would see a benefit from it well the whole thing is actually thought to have been a complete disaster it's commonly cited as one of the worst attempts at this in order to receive that 55% ownership the employees were asked to give up a combined 4.8 billion dollars in future salaries and benefits already that had a lot of people unhappy many of them said that they would just rather have the cash to pay for their bills week to week rather than this lengthy stock ownership plan it depended on the Union that represented each person but many people were forced into it the flight attendants did not take part in it which further divided everyone the plan was meant to pull everyone together when in reality it was just pulling them further apart plus there's more layers the pilots were soon negotiating new deals to better make up for that reduced salary which involved rebelling and refusing to do certain things like working overtime that did not help with the customers experience on top of that the employees weren't given much in the way of decision-making or voting so it prevented them from ever possessing that sense of ownership simply put the company was too large there were too many factors opposing it and it wasn't implemented the ideal way so I think most would agree it that the whole thing ended up reflecting poorly upon the company it's even thought to have been one of the major factors contributing to their 2002 bankruptcy that was just one example of a generally poor relationship between the company and their employees another one would be in 2018 when they revealed their plans to change their bonus program where instead of a standard bonus the qualifying employees would instead get placed into some sort of a raffle the top prize was going to be $100,000 it effectively transformed it to where a lucky few people would be given more money and then the majority of them would receive nothing well it turns out the employees didn't care for the idea they didn't want to be forced into gambling with their money they just wanted their bonuses United ultimately responded by abandoning the program for the rest of the video I want to talk about how the customers have been directly harmed by United Airlines by highlighting three major incidents involving them now I should make it clear these are extreme cases they're not common so they likely won't happen to you but they did happen and they were widely reported so we can say that they played a part in changing the public's perception I don't like this one harming pets as I understand it in 2018 a woman was travelling on a united flight with her two kids and her 10 month old puppy in a carrying case a flight attendant argued and forced the woman to store the puppy in the overhead compartment which already I don't like this one as it turns out there's no ventilation up there and he suffocated by the end of the flight here's a sad statement by one of the witnessing passengers they said I heard the dog barking a little and we didn't realize it was barking a cry for help so I'll just end that one there actually that same week they put a different dog on a flight to Japan when he was supposed to be traveling domestically to Kansas City and then a very similar incidents happened a year before with a rapper named schoolboy Q's dog as well the next one is united breaks guitars in this one a musician named dave carroll was on a united flight still on the ground when he and the other passengers witnessed the crude throwing guitars he realized they were likely his so he told multiple employees about it who didn't seem to care when he landed he learned that his guitar was indeed broken and after numerous unsuccessful attempts at trying to get United to own up to it and fix the situation he wrote a song about it in 2009 and it became a viral hit on YouTube currently at around 20 million views the song is called it United breaks guitars and it's pretty good I recommend you listen to it if you haven't already and again this was not good publicity for United Airlines the next one concerns a man who was dragged off a plane these are all bad this may be the biggest one the passengers had already boarded the plane when United said that they needed four employees to take the seats of the passengers because they needed to be transported to another flight where they'd be working I don't think you can say that the flight was technically overbooked but they did need to empty some seats so they chose four passengers at random to leave the plane one of them was a doctor named David Dao who was actually on his way home to Kentucky where he would start his shift at a hospital when he was asked to leave the flight he refused it was important to him that he got to Kentucky in a timely manner because he had patients to see after his refusal he was involuntarily dragged off the plane by security officers there is footage of this taken by the other passengers now it's a little graphic so I'll just show some stills here but it was excessive there was blood all over his face and the other passengers were freaking out and it was a bad scene then to make things worse soon after the incident the CEO of United Airlines issued a very unsatisfying apology he then sent an email to United employees that almost justified what happened and in a way even insulted David Dow calling him disruptive and belligerent were the words he used the CEO has responded to the backlash with a more appropriate apology and it only took a few weeks for a settlement to be reached between the doctor and the airline the amount hasn't been disclosed but it's rumored that David Dow received millions of dollars for what happened I don't think I have to point out that the whole thing was a public relations nightmare to summarize United Airlines is a large company in a market that lacks competition even within that market over the past couple of decades they've been especially disliked by their customers and to an extent the people who work for them the three incidents I described are more major publicized cases but there are lesser versions of these happening all the time damaged luggage pet issues sort of overbooked flights I think that's part of the reason that the public responds so strongly when we hear these stories we can relate to them since many of us have experienced them in some capacity it's good to see some attention drawn to the issue so when you combine all of this think it helps explain why United Airlines is so hated let me know in the comments how do you feel about United Airlines if you had any notably bad or good experiences with them I wasn't trying to convince anyone that they should hate United Airlines I didn't have any personal agenda but maybe I did bring something to your attention so I should ask has this video changed your perception of them I'd like to hear what you have to say thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Company Man

Views: 867,414

Rating: 4.8271699 out of 5

Keywords: United Airlines, Airlines, Travel, Hated, Companies, Business

Id: N-FV2akzUg8

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020