Cracker Rage Costs United Airlines $550,000

(6/25/2015) Last week, United Airlines Flight 971 flying from Rome to Chicago made an emergency landing in Belfast. Around 270 passengers are forced to sleep in the airport terminal because Belfast has not enough hotel to handle so many passengers. This type of air traffic disruption became more common recently and most of them are caused by unruled behavior of passengers. This episode was the same. However, after investigation, we found that the cause was because a male passenger demanding extra crackers several times and become a safety concern. The cost of this landing is estimated to be around $550,000.

United Breaks Guitar

(1/23/2013) In 1998, Canadian musician Dave Carroll flew United Airlines for his music tour. Dave checked in his Taylor guitar but his guitar was damaged when he arrived. Dave complained to United Airlines and hoped to get compensation for his guitar repair. After many long calls to the customer service representatives, United refused to compensate Dave for the guitar repair. Dave swore to the United's CS representative that he will make three songs telling people that United Airlines broke his guitar. And he did.



After the launch of this well-made (humorous but not angry) video, it quickly accrued a lot of attention. Rumor says that United Airlines wanted to settle with Dave and hoped he can take down this video from Youtube, but Dave declined. At this moment (Jan. 2013) this video has 12 millions views on youtube. This video significantly changed Dave's life. Going through what he experienced, he became a sort-of celebrity with successful video revenge. He has been invited to give many speeches to business about how to do better customer relationship, published a book about customer relationship, has become a more successful musician, and does an advertisement for a hard-shell guitar case. Besides, the CEO of Taylor, Bob Taylor, gave him a brand-new Taylor guitar.

Lesson learned: David can still defeat Goliath.