Service Failures at United Airlines Flight 3411
Case Study: HBR Case Study: David Dao on United Airlines
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Questions
What happened on UA flight 3411 and what were the causes of service failures?
What service expectations do customers have of Airlines such as UA? How did these expectations develop over time?
What steps can UA take to rebuild its tarnished brand image?
United Airlines Case Study Write-up
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United Airlines Case Study Write-up
The events of 9th April 2017 were a significant setback for United Airlines (UA). On that fateful day, the airline needed to bump four passengers from UA flight 3411 into another flight to create space for four staff members (Puri et al., 2018). Despite offering the passengers vouchers as compensation for four of them to leave the flight voluntarily, no one was willing. The crew, therefore, used a computer algorithm that would randomly select four passengers who would have to involuntarily depart and move to the next scheduled flight (Puri et al., 2018). Three of the passengers who were selected randomly left the flight, while the fourth one refused to depart. Therefore, an aviation officer forcefully dragged the fourth passenger from the flight undignifiedly, leaving him bruised. According to Puri et al. (2018), the scenario was captured and surfaced on social media, causing UA to lose a significant number of its customers and good reputation.
There were several causes of service failures from this incident. First, UA displayed an ineffective public relations approach that caused the social uproar to escalate. The United Airlines CEO released his first statement the following day after the incident and used terms that the social media community found relatively insensitive and unacceptable. One such term was ‘re-accommodating’ the four passengers in his apology (Puri et al., 2018). Secondly, the CEO attempted to downplay the negative incident through his statement to his employees, stating that they had followed protocol and that the customer who was dragged was disruptive (Puri et al., 2018). Unfortunately, the statement was symbolically equivalent to adding salt to an open wound since the online uproar and the airline&rsq...