Opportunity Cost

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        United Airlines has potentially buried its business purely based on its own inability to book its own flights accordingly. They might even have to change its slogan or implement a new systematic change to reinforce its slogan of “United Airlines, Fly the friendly skies”, based on the latest event of brute force used to remove a surgeon from a flight. The Airline itself wasn’t the only ones to be held accountable for the harshness that will potentially cost billions, O’Hare Airport Security also played a vital role in this horrific opportunity cost situation.

On April 9th, 2017 United Airlines overbooked a flight very intentionally. This is common practice among airlines to ensure their planes are filled in the event  people don’t make their flight, the airlines can still maintain their maximum threshold needed to profit. Passengers had already boarded on Sunday at O'Hare International Airport when United Airline asked for volunteers to take another flight the next day so that four United Airline staff members who needed seats could fly. Keep in mind these passengers have had reserved and paid tickets for an amount of time prior the boarding the flight and no-one was willing to give up his or her seat. The airline offered $400 for a hotel so that the volunteers could leave on a later flight; and after they had no takers the offer increased to $800. Still there were no takers so the Airline Randomly chose four people to exit the plane so its own employees could take flight. (Domonoske, 2017) Two of the people chosen left the plane and when the last two passengers whom are a married couple were approached on the subject the man explained that that he was a surgeon and had cases waiting for him in the morning and he had to stay on the plane. It was at that point that United Airlines made a costly mistake; they called in O’Hare Airports Security police and had the man physically removed. During this time, the passanger had his lip busted, and damage to his nose that requires surgery, the loss of two front teeth, along with the embarrassment of being dragged off the aircraft against his will with his clothing no longer covering his body. (India, 2017)

These very bad business decisions have cost United Airlines billions in revenue. “United has lost $570 million in market cap this week, while Warren Buffett may have lost over $50 million on his investment”; “Buffett owned 28,951,353 shares of United. With 9.2% of the shares outstanding, Buffett was by far the carrier’s largest shareholder.  If his holdings remain unchanged, Buffett would have lost $52.4 million this week on his United bet.” (Kilgor, 2017)

The opportunity cost of overbooking cost United Airlines a lot more than the cost of a few seats. A lawsuit from the Surgeon for all his injury pain and suffering, time and money lost from surgeries that were not preformed will most likely follow. Potential future passengers will most likely take a huge decrease in days, weeks, months and possibly years, depending how long people boycott United for the inhuman actions.

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