02-26-2010
04:38 PM
4 Loves
ugly; the whole thing.
to Southwest : policies are great excuses, but they should only excuse you if you actually follow them. Now in this case, i think your response is a pathetic attempt to hide behind your "Passenger of Size Policy" ; when that policy was not the basis in fact for removing Kevin Smith from the flight. He sat in a single seat on his way to Oakland, and was sitting in his seat with armrests down when your Suzanne(a real sweetheart for customers) came to remove him. Ignoring your policy's assertion that the "definitive boundary between seats is the armrest", you admit KS was removed because "we made a judgment call that Mr. Smith needed more than one seat to complete his flight." If he actually violated your size policy i'm sure you would come out and say that, as it would be your strongest argument. Instead, you put a paragraph reciting the facts (some of them) adjacent to one which begins with the line "you've read about these situations before..." , and slimily goes on to explain the virtues of enforcing your Size policy and its "definitive boundary" (you know, the one "we" of the "judgment call" ignored); hoping i guess that people giving you the benefit of the doubt , cuz they dislike overweight people in general or just KS, will assume that this is just another one of "these situations" where a fat person's body size exceeds the dimensions of the alloted space; and, will conclude instinctually that southwest should do this MORE OFTEN and that FATTIES have to shut up about it, especially KS, cuz no one is as fat as him and of course he was spilling over the armrests. Well, you'd have to forget most of the facts to come down on your side of this, but some on this thread have managed to do that. Good business judgment. Fiscally responsible. maybe. but customer driven, really? Really? i don't know what kind of customers you are serving but most of america is overweight last time i checked. Maybe you should also enstate a policy to throw the biggest and/or worst (as voted on by cabin crew) luggage out in midflight unless each owner of that luggage paid a "stowage of size convenience fee" on the spot . you could lighten the load and make some more revenue. Or maybe you could, contrary to your "never kill customers" policy toss people out of the plane into the ocean or right into the jet turbines (messy) and then just claim it was a judgment call that had to be made for safety reasons and blahblalalalala, and "safety reasons" always means secret reasons (as in this case) and of course we should just trust you and the good people working there that even though it appears your employees just arbitrarily violate your own policies at their whim and rely on the secret safety considerations and ancillary "captain's" discretionary powers to violate definitive boundaries to obscure the truth, it's all cuz you love us.
Suzanne, et al should be fired if they abused their authority, and clearly someone did. that would be step one of actually dealing with your problems: the unintended consequences of your genius policy to provide customer comfort and safety. ugly.
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