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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

A ticket is just a deal between you and the airline. At any point the airline can decide it's not going to uphold that deal.

Sure, you can try to go to the courts to get monetary compensation for that, but you can't force them to provide the service.

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That makes them an unreliable partner to deal with. A ticket is not just a simple product, there are other deals depending on it. You may have a vacation booked, an important meeting, a funeral, or anything else. Missing your flight could mean missing a lot more than just the flight. The airline should take their agreements a lot more seriously than this.

And yet the thing people actually shop on is price.

Well, differentiating airlines is hard. To me, a for the most part non-traveler, they all offer pretty much the same product, quality-wise. Unless I was to up my ticket to some other class, every coach ticket is pretty much the same. So what am I supposed to differentiate on other than price?

Sure, but part of the point is that it isn't an accident. Airlines are paying attention to what people respond to so instead of going out of their way to compete on quality or whatever other factors, they compete on price.

I understand, but I don't think we can put the blame on the consumer alone. When all pretty-much compete on price alone, we can only compare on price alone.

If people manage to remember this event, they can now also compare on violently getting thrown off the plane.

Well, differentiating airlines is hard.

In future one might consider, "how likely are they to violently drag me off a plane?"

I'll be sure to select the non-violent checkbox on Google Flights, despite the need to save the $4.50 round-trip.

It is really rather easy to avoid it, just follow lawful orders by the flight crew.

But if the airline takes their agreement a lot more seriously than this, then they're going to need to have reserve capacity. No more overbooking flights. Have standby pilots and planes available. Those things cost, and will show up in ticket prices.

The public has pretty well demonstrated that they prefer lower-price tickets over a higher-quality flying experience. So the airlines are giving the public what (the majority of) the public wants - a crappy, but cheap, experience.

If people decide that that's actually likely to happen, nobody will buy airline tickets. You pay the airline to get you to your destination, but if it's likely that you won't actually get to your destination, why risk paying the airline?

That's the source of the brand damage here: many people (rightly or not) will be wondering whether the same thing might happen to them if they fly United, and decide it's not worth the risk.

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