Last week, I wrote a short post about United Airlines stepping up and allowing people flying into the former Palm Beach International Airport (PBI) - now renamed after our current President - to fly into alternative nearby airports if they so desired.
I should have held my tongue.
From the article:
Travelers booked into Florida's newly renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport should not expect a free pass out. United Airlines said Friday that a widely circulated internal memo suggesting agents could reroute passengers to Fort Lauderdale or Miami at no extra cost was "poorly worded and not accurate" — and that its policy has never allowed changes based on what an airport is called.
"United customers are able to make changes to a ticket without a fee for many reasons," the airline said in statements to multiple outlets. "However, our policy doesn't allow for changes because of an airport's name or three letter code."
The clarification came one day after aviation blog Live and Let's Fly published what it described as an internal memo to United reservation agents, instructing them to offer "acceptable alternatives" — including Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) and Miami International Airport (MIA) — to customers who objected to flying into the airport formerly known as Palm Beach International Airport (PBI). The memo provided agents a suggested response and directed them to process any switch as "an even exchange," language that prompted widespread reports that United was quietly offering cost-free reroutes over a political objection. United did not deny the memo's authenticity.
United chickened out. Bwaaaak. Bwak. Bwak. Bwak Bwak. Bwak.
On a serious note, this is a great reminder that the corporations ae primarily incentivized to do one thing: Maximize profitability. People within corporations may try to do the “right thing” now and then, but when push comes to shove, to bastardize something Martin Luther King once said, the long arc of corporate management/leadership bends towards money.
That’s why treating corporations as people and imputing constitutional rights to corporations is madness. Again, corporations are statutory entities; they are created by law and they can be banned by law. One other small fact that makes giving corporations constitutional rights seem somewhat… unconstitutional: corporations are mentioned exactly ZERO times in the constitution. Nil. Never. Nada.
So you go United. do your thing. But everyone should remember that United - and other corporations - are basically NEVER acting in your self-interest.
