United Airlines CEO surprises passenger with classy move
This article appeared on November 29, 2018, via the Chicago Business Journal (bizjournals.com/chicago). It was reprinted with permission from Ed Stych, Editor, Digital Cities for American City Business Journals. The article highlights Oscar Munoz (Beta Tau/Southern California 1982).
United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz looks to have his own way of selling customers on the Chicago-based airline by doing one good deed at a time.
That was made evident in a thoughtful act by Munoz that United passenger Rebecca Kuchar Krutz documented in a Facebook posting on Monday, Nov. 26.
Krutz in her note identified herself as a loyal Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) customer. But for reasons not explained in her note, Krutz was flying United on Monday in the company of none other than Munoz himself.
In Krutz's recounting of events pertaining to that particular United flight, she said she noted an elderly woman who looked rather frail at the boarding gate and again when the woman was seated in front of Krutz in the plane’s first-class cabin.
How she came to be in that first-class seat was the principal reason for Krutz’s post.
The Delta loyalist first spotted CEO Munoz in a group of people at the boarding gate for the flight. Krutz also noted that Munoz broke away from the group to walk over and talk to the aforementioned elderly woman.
Munoz’s conversation with the woman, Krutz surmised, resulted in her being reassigned to the first class cabin, while Munoz took the elderly United customer’s previously-assigned seat in the economy cabin — or "steerage" as it's sometime less-flatteringly characterized.
In the normal course of affairs at United, of course, Munoz and other top executives are automatically seated in first class when traveling. It’s typically in their contracts.
But by the same token, Munoz and the other executives can do with that seat as they see fit.
Subsequently Krutz said she overhead the woman who had gotten Munoz’s first class seat telling the passenger next to her in the premium cabin how astonished she was by Munoz’s kind gesture — to which Krutz added her own editorial comment in the Facebook post: “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how it should be done. Treat our elders with the respect and care they deserve.”
United’s social media team took immediate note of Krutz’s posting — which touchingly plays to United’s Core4 strategy to become a more caring airline in the wake of the horrific man-dragged-from-airplane incident that sullied the United brand in the spring of 2017.
United President Scott Kirby rolled out that new Core4 strategy in late 2017.
United Airlines is a unit of United Continental Holdings (NASDAQ: UAL).
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