Yet another example of customer disservice?
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Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
“You have to give up the seat or you’re going to jail, your wife is going to jail and they’ll take your kids from you.”
These are the words of a Delta employee to a seated passenger, as the airline tried to get him to give up one of the seats he says he’d paid for, so that someone else could sit in it.
Californian Brian Schear posted video of the encounter — on a Delta flight from Maui to LA — and, yet again, it makes for uncomfortable airline viewing.
Schear claims that the airline wanted him and his wife to remove their 2-year-old from one of the seats — he was strapped into a car seat on the seat — to make way for another passenger.
He says the Delta agent wanted his 2-year-old to be carried on one of the parents’ laps. Schear refused. He’d paid for the ticket. Why should he concede?
As he said on YouTube: “They oversold the flight and asked us to give up a seat we purchased for my older son that my younger son was sitting in. You will hear them lie to me numerous times to get my son out of the seat.The end result was we were all kicked off the flight. They then filled our 4 seats with 4 customers that had tickets but no seats.”
Schear said he ultimately agreed to move his son, but by that stage, the airline decided to get the whole family off the plane.
Some might decide that Schear isn’t entirely in the right here. He’d originally bought the seat for his 18-year-old son, but sent him home on an earlier flight.
In the airline’s eyes, this 18-year-old hadn’t turned up for the flight, so it was free to resell the ticket. Schear, though, insists that the airline knew he was going to use the seat for his 2-year-old.
And so we have another airline seeming to unreasonably threaten a paying passenger, when for all the world this could have been handled differently.
If, as Schear says, he’d paid for the seat, didn’t the Delta staff consider that they’d made enough money already?
“You need to do what’s right,” Schear tells the Delta employee. “I bought the seat.”
The employee continues to trickle supposed regulations, claiming that Schear’s son “owns” the seat. He gets quoted “Federal policy.”
I went, however, to Delta’s own site, where it recommends that kids under the age of 2 should, indeed, fly in individual seats, secured in a car seat. This seems to be exactly what Schear was doing.
The Federal Aviation Administration recommends the same thing.
Was it truly necessary to sell that seat again for an additional bonanza?
I contacted Delta and will update, should it throw me a reply. The airline did tell CBS2: “We are sorry for what this family experienced. Our team has reached out, and we will be talking with them to better understand what happened and come to a resolution.”
Schear does seem to make reasonable arguments when he wonders in the video why he and his family were all allowed to board the plane before the airline suddenly decided that they’d contravened some sort of regulation.
“We can sit here for the next four hours, five hours if you want and this plane will not leave,” a Delta employee says to Schear in the video.
She claims this is part of her trying to “help” him and offering a “courtesy.”
Well, let’s talk about that courtesy. When Schear and his family were finally removed from the plane, he asks where he and his family are supposed to stay and how are they supposed to get back to LA.
“Sir, you should have thought about that in the beginning,” the employee replies. “At this point you guys are on your own.”
Last week, Delta threw a passenger off a plane for going to the restroom just before takeoff.
This week, airlines executives went to Congress to explain they will try harder.
Currently, as Schear says near the end of his video: “Great customer service.”
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.