United Airlines gives woman $10,000 after taking her off overbooked flight
A woman has received a $10,000 travel voucher from United Airlines after she was bumped from her flight.
United reportedly had an issue with one of the seats on a fully booked plane leaving from Washington and headed to Austin. They decided that Allison Preiss, a communications director in the US capital who was headed to Texas for a bachelorette party, was the one after nobody volunteered to be booted from the flight and they chose the lowest paying fare to bump.
In a series of tweets, the experience is documented on Ms Preiss’ Twitter feed as she shifts from outrage that United was forcing a traveller off a flight, to still-inconvenienced surprised delight.
“United is offering $1K in travel credit for an oversold flight. If nobody bites, they will kick off the lowest fare passenger by pulling them out of the boarding line. For a flight that THEY oversold. Unreal,” she wrote on Twitter at 8.19am while waiting for her flight.
Several tweets later, United had apparently found a bad aide for their mistake.
“They really do not want to give me cash. They just offered me $10,000 in travel credit. TEN THOUSAND,” Ms Preiss said.
United Airlines later confirmed that the tweets were real to Sky Blog, saying that the voucher was issued per their voucher policies.
United raised the cap on their vouchers to $10,000 last April after a public relations disaster when a video surfaced showing United employees dragging passenger David Dao off of a flight, bloodied up.
After the incident with Mr Dao, United conducted a review and published a 10-point plan, which included raising the voucher limits to $10,000.
United has had other bad publicity lately as well, including the recent death of a pet dog when flight attendants forced a family to put the pup in an overhead bin.
