thank you United---stick with it, I get to Aspen eventually

Thank you United.  Over the past month you have provided my family with some great dinner table topics and even a business case study.

First let me help you out with crisis management---when you do something really wrong you can fumble the ball just like you did or you can turn lemons into lemonade.  In this case here is what you should have done.

Dr. XXX (the guy dragged out of the plane)--we are so sorry.  While we can in no way make up for how horribly we treated you, we would like a chance to show you we can and will do better.  We would like to offer you and a companion free first class air travel for a year--anywhere you want to go as often as you want to go. 

To the passengers on the plane who were witness to our poor service we offer a $500 travel voucher.  

We are also going to adjust some policies--first off even though our lawyers insist that we retain the right to remove passengers in order to move necessary personnel from one city to another we have told our agents that they can offer pretty much whatever it takes to get the requisite number of passengers to volunteer to take a later flight.  Finally in an effort to show we are putting our customers first our flight crews will no longer use any of the overhead storage for their bags.  If checking is good enough for our customers it's good enough for us.

So United thanks for giving us a chance to talk about crisis management, how to say you're sorry, and how to step up when you screw up to improve your business and improve your reputation.

But what does any of this have to do with my blog.  Before the overbooking incident there was the United leggings incident.  You probably already forgot about this but it happened right as we were traveling for spring break on United and it got my family's attention.

A family was traveling with two young daughters who were wearing leggings.  The gate agent told them they wouldn't be allowed to travel in what the gate agent termed inappropriate clothing.  A passerby saw what was going on and tweeted about it.  And from there it became front page news.  What the passerby didn't know was the family included a United employee and they were flying for free, but which includes some special restrictions such as what you can wear.  Just imagine on a take your kid to work day if they chose to wear a bikini, would it be wrong for your employer to say they have got to go home?  I don't think so.

Which finally gets me close to my point.  The passerby published very incomplete information.  She got involved in something that she didn't understand and told the world a side of the story that missed a lot of what was going on.  In the overbooking case, there was information that was glossed over (such as the terms of carriage we agree to when we purchase an airline ticket), but the basic facts were right from the get go and the potential impact (being forcibly removed from an airplane for no other reason than the airline wants to maximise it profits) impacts all of us.

Which gets me to Aspen.  It's a small town.  Its very easy to get you nose into everyone's business.  Before going crazy blogovating on the internet, maybe take a breath, gather some information and try to figure out if its a case of employees kids in leggings or passengers being forcibly ejected from a plane.  We would all be much happier if we did not worry so much about other people's business and focused more on our own.