United Airlines Argument Essay

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On April 9, 2017 after boarding a United Airline’s flight from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, Dr. David Dao was forcibly removed from his seat due to the overbooking of flight 3411. Dao was not simply escorted out, but appeared in a viral video to be bleeding from his nose while he was dragged down the aisle of the plane. The 69 year old doctor sued the airline and eventually reached an undisclosed settlement. The handling of the situation, from a public relations standpoint was not only poorly executed by the CEO, but handled in an untimely manner. I will explain what they did wrong as well as give my suggestions for how it could have been handled better. Immediately following the incident, United Airlines CEO, Oscar Munoz did apologies, but not to Dr. Dao personally. He …show more content…

He later sent out a letter to all United employees basically stating that United will be looking into the event further so incidents like this will not happen again. After making these public statements Munoz came under heavy criticism, forcing him to change his stance and state that the airline “takes full responsibility” for this event. I believe that this was his first major mistake. In the world that we live in today —social media and the internet — every event no matter how trivial has the potential to be exposed in a very short period of time. This means that public relations must be completely transparent and punctual. When Munoz released his last statement, multiple days after the event, it came off as if he was changing his story in the midst of criticism. It may have been better if he stuck to his initial story at this point. As I stated earlier transparency is key to keeping the public trust, I believe that if Munoz

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