United Airlines Accused of Faking Unruly Passengers to Solve Business Class Overbooking Crisis At Newark – View from the Wing

United Airlines Accused of Faking Unruly Passengers to Solve Business Class Overbooking Crisis At Newark

by Gary Leff on May 29, 2024

Friday’s United Airlines Newark to Dubrovnik flight was reportedly oversold in business class. United doesn’t normally sell more tickets in business class than they have seats, and it doesn’t appear that the aircraft was swapped to one with a smaller business class cabin.

Nobody would take the airline’s generous offers of compensation, even though “[t]hey offered 2500 and then 3000.” The flight was already delayed three hours, and the Boeing 767-400 was oversold in business by three while economy and premium economy were full.

Unsure who would be flying – though presumably passengers without seat assignments were not – gate agents “said only [coach] and [premium economy] could board.”

One passenger on the flight “heard the gate agents scheming that they would call a supervisor to solve the issue by claiming unruly passengers.”

There had been no unruly behavior. Indeed shortly thereafter as boarding was still held while the entire Y and W cabins had boarded, a couple expressed their irritation that they had paid lots of money for their vacation which was being unnecessarily delayed which was then backed up by an elderly woman.

Not aggressive, unruly or physical – an assessment backed up by many other passengers. Sure enough gate agents claimed them to be unruly and offloaded them. The elderly woman’s husband of course refused to fly which explains why the fight went out 32/34. Presumably one of those two was crew rest.

On the one hand, this story about gate agents manufacturing unruly passengers in order to offload them and get the flight out makes no sense.

• They could involuntary deny boarding to passengers and owe a maximum of $1,550 cash per passenger
• It’s not the agent’s money, so what’s the incentive here anyway?
• Involuntarily denying boarding is not harder than dealing with unruly passenger reporting.

On the other hand, this makes perfect sense: it’s Newark. Still, while yelling at a passenger seems completely plausible there, I don’t find that employees at Newark want to go out of their way to do much work? And being nasty to passengers so that the passengers will respond aggressively so that they can bump those passengers off the flight without compensation just seems like a lot of work for little personal benefit.

A witness to the events at the gate for that flight doesn’t think this is what happened, so I’m betting that the agents were joking about passengers being unruly and getting kicked off solving the overbooking problem and then it just so happens that passengers did become aggressive with the oversale (and perhaps the agents were themselves aggressive in response, having them kicked off the flight).

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