A 30-second video of a United Airlines passenger being dragged from his seat and bloodied on an overbooked Sunday flight at O’Hare International Airport racked up more than 6 million views Monday and sparked plenty of outrage.
For United, the video threatened to unravel more than a year of work by CEO Oscar Munoz to rebuild the airline’s battered customer service reputation — and prompted questions about why United didn’t try harder to fix the situation rather than apologizing afterward for having to “reaccommodate” passengers.
Twitter and Facebook were full of video of the incident:
@United overbook #flight3411 and decided to force random passengers off the plane. Here's how they did it: pic.twitter.com/QfefM8X2cW
— Jayse D. Anspach (@JayseDavid) April 10, 2017
@united @FoxNews @CNN not a good way to treat a Doctor trying to get to work because they overbooked pic.twitter.com/sj9oHk94Ik
— Tyler Bridges (@Tyler_Bridges) April 9, 2017
It was also the second time in two weeks that Chicago-based United took a beating on social media. Dan and Amy previously talked about the wardrobe controversy at United. The airline was previously chastised for not allowing two teens wearing leggings — a violation of a dress code for employees and guests traveling on the company’s dime — to board an airplane. That time however, the teens were flying on the company’s dime. This was a paying customer forcibly dragged off of an aircraft.
Would you be less likely to book a flight with United thanks to their less than stellar customer service record lately?