If you keep reading it becomes apparent why this is actually quite shady and not a clean dodge for united. It's an attempt to use lower-wage non-union workers, made more interesting by the fact that Republic are going through bankruptcy (and therefore aren't themselves being sued by the passengers, since there's some sort of limit on the compensation they could get) and that United are semi-OK with taking the blame to permit Republic to recover a bit
If I buy a ticket from United Airlines, I don't care if they contract it out or code share things with some other company. Your ticket is with one company. It's their responsibility to hold another / the contracted company accountable, not yours.
Agree. I had a similar dispute with a codeshare ticket in the past. You make a contract with the airline that sells you the ticket and it is their responsibility to resolve the issue with their carrier.
In a codeshare dispute, both airlines will blame each other, but it is important to focus all your efforts on the ticket seller.
The emphasis on the contracted airline seems like is helping United by diverting blame away from its brand. Legally United might be able to dodge a few issues based on it and technically they might be in the right over what they did. Morally and as far as public perception goes, they should bare full responsibility.
Why does Lufthansa use Cityline and/or Germanwings or any number of similarly positioned companies to do their bidding on lower density routes?
Nearly every major airline in the world that serves feeder routes does this.
Remember that Republic also does the American Eagle flights.
If these contracting arrangements weren't possible, then you'd see many major airlines dropping the routes.
The typical plane for the route in question holds 76 passengers. With margins around 1% or less, that flight is making a tiny profit. Let's say, just for the sake of argument that the average ticket price was $200. That's $15200 in revenue for the plane (excluding cargo.) That airplane typically has two flight attendants, two pilots and an assortment of ground crew. Also remember that close to 50% of ticket revenues are actually taxes and fees that don't go to the airline but to government. So that $15k is now closer to $9k -- that's revenue, not profit. This if for a nearly 1 hour flight.
Do you know the operating costs of your average Embraer 175? Landing fees? Gate slot fees?
My point is that United/American definitely don't want to pay higher union wages for routes that are operating on razor thin margins as it is. If they raise ticket prices, planes will be less full, crushing the margins even more, if they pay more, that also crushes the margins. Either way, even a slight increase in costs somewhere in the system destroys the profitability of the route.
Perhaps we should be complaining about government taking such a huge proportion of taxes and fees rather than United trying to minimize costs. For a business making literally 1% margins on most flights, we certainly have a lot of opinions about how bad they are when they try to keep costs down.
The subcontracting of routes isn't what I meant was shady (maybe a bad choice of words) - but the whole "things aren't as they seem" vibe. Plus since United could rightly have lumped the entirety of the blame for an insanely high profile screw up on someone else and issued the usual press release about how they're gonna hold their suppliers to higher standards in future blah blah. But they didn't, it's just ... weird
