United Airlines passengers to see targeted ads on seat-back screens

Wilshire@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 799 points –
United Airlines passengers to see targeted ads on seat-back screens
cbsnews.com
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For those of you contemplating ways of covering up the ads:

This is the same airline that beat the shit out of that doctor because the airline overbooked the flight. For your own safety, do not cross this airline.

The Chicago Department of Aviation did that. The same way if the police ends up killing someone, it was not the person calling the police.

United was booting passengers to make room for employee transfers though, the situation was shit before dept of aviation even got the call.

Those employees could have stood. Frontier and Spirit give vouchers out when they intentionally overbook.......which before the pandemic was everyday. If nobody takes the bait, they up the voucher value. For them it's essentially monopoly money.

If United couldn't get anybody to bite at the vouchers, then the employees should have stood the whole flight. Instead, they beat a man who was not fighting back physically. He only insisted that he get to his patient. They LITERALLY dragged him off the plane. By his ankle, as he tried to grab onto anything he could.

If United couldn't get anybody to bite at the vouchers, then the employees should have stood the whole flight.

Yeah, that is not a solution. The FAA is salivating at the thought of this. Everyone must have a seat for takeoff and landing.

Sure, but telling someone to leave their plane for some oddball reason is "only bad" not outright crazy like what happened then.

i think we should make them afraid to cross us

They did what?

"The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of mishandled customer service."

Made me laugh, that's putting it lightly..

“The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of mishandled manhandled customer service.”

Just a typo.

Holy shit what a ride that was.

It's clear from a lot of stories like this (severe customer mistreatment) that United employees are miserable people who hate their jobs but this is nuts. I hope Dr. Dao got a huge settlement from United.

Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.

I'd expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn't pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.

United is Four Seasons compared to American.

Wow. Even Trump thought they went too far. Damn.

And the CEO who brushed that assault off ‘suffered’ a ‘delayed promotion’. Poor thing. For saying that stuff about anyone, let alone a customer, he should have been fired, no golden parachute.

I think the doctor’s patients should have sued the airline too, since no doubt having their doctor pounded to a pulp caused them to miss their appointments.

I got screeched at for covering up a super bright blinking light on a red eye. Their FAs are next level stupid.

Overbooking should be a mandatory minimum compensation of the greater of 1000x the ticket price or $20k. It's a truly fucked up practice to disrespect people's time like that.

Oh, we'll just refund you the cost of the ticket. That was the whole cost, right?

Dude, you can just turn the screen off. Its OK.

"If you don't like it don't fly"

Seriously just shut up.

Edit: LMAO just saw your other comment where you actually said this sincerely. You're a parody of yourself.

Comedy is an art form. You need to commit to the joke.

Have you ever turned a screen off on one of these planes? They turn back on. So you turn them off again. Sooner or later, they turn back on. And repeat.

Worse, you will be surrounded by them on all sides, as others don't bother... :-(

I have. It usually stays off until they rig the cabin for final approach. Comes back on for landing but hey, whatever?

I'm getting beaten up for my stance here, but seriously: if all it takes to put you over is some midflight ads the do the rest of us a favor and don't fly. Take a train or whatever.

Y'all are acting like they're gonna strap us down and tape our eyes open like that Alex Whasisname kid in A Clockwork Orange. I assure you that doesn't happen for another 22 years in this timeline (give or take).

People like you constantly give corporations an inch because "it's not a big deal" and here we are.

I don't think you're being beaten up for it. I certainly am not beating you up for it. But usually, yeah, the screen does come back on during the flight. I think they turn it back on automatically every time there's an announcement. As somebody who finds screens like that very distracting and even migraine-inducing (the "busyness" of that sort of thing is a big trigger), it's really frustrating.

Depends on the plane and system it has. Last United flight I was on it stayed off the entire flight. I use my phone and generally don’t look at it anyway but it was nicer I suppose.

I honestly couldn't care less how many adverts they show me, they can have a constant stream of adverts the whole flight if it means that some shitty corporation is paying a portion of my travel coats.

People really need to grow up about stuff like this, if you don't want adverts then pay for a premium service - I'm poor, I'll accept the adverts.

That money isn't subsidizing your flight cost, it's increasing corporate profits.

Here's the thing: companies have learned they can add ads to make additional money without passing any of that on to their customers.

If you think you're going to get a better rate for having ads, you're fooling yourself. They'll always charge as much as they can get people to pay and that amount isn't affected by ads most of the time.

This is thinking based on emotion not reality, most of the internet is free because of adverts so your belief that it's not used to lower prices is clearly silly. Yes companies love profit but they often increase profits by lowering prices to attract more business, it's a perfectly valid business model to use adverts to reduce the cost to the customer and increase customer volume.

No, you can't.

You can, there's a button combo. It changes sometimes but if you spam a few things I can always black it out

But that's not the point, it still sucks