Airlines must learn

The recent event of inhuman treatment of a passenger and his wife who were offloaded from a United Airlines flight in the US may serve as a very good lesson to the global airline industry. The Indian experience in this particular aspect of flying is reportedly far better than international practices that allow cavalier overbooking of flights on the grounds that cancellations will always take care of the additional seats sold. In fact, the Indigo Airlines model of a reservation system that does not allow overbooking of flights is to be highly recommended. The figures of overbooking in India are less — about 15,000 in 2016 against an estimated 10 crore fliers — but then the number of fliers in a year in India is also far less than in the US or Europe. How airlines treat passengers on flights that are overbooked is one of the industry’s bigger challenges among many in open-skies aviation of today.

The experience of the offloaded passengers on United could have been the stuff of a horror movie. But then you would expect it of an extremely competitive business environment. The issue is further clouded by overtones of racism as somehow an Asian couple was conveniently picked out of more than 100 passengers. How asinine the airline sounded in offloading passengers who were on the aircraft already only added to the serious situation created by the security staff manhandling the doctor of Chinese origin, causing him considerable physical damage besides the psychological hurt of being treated like a criminal. To make matters worse, the airline was refusing to apologise and then grovelled only after social media outrage caused such havoc as to take close to a billion off the stock value. This was one instance of the social media bringing about an agreeable outcome in punishing the airline for its lack of concern for passengers.