"United Breaks Guitars"

On March 31, 2008 a member of the band Sons of Maxwell, Dave Carroll, witnessed his $3500 710 Taylor guitar being tossed by the baggage employees from United Airlines just outside his window seat in Omaha, Nebraska as they were waiting to deplane. As Carroll tried to communicate with the flight attendants and let them know what was going on they simply told him that there was nothing they could do because of a waiver that he had had signed earlier which Carroll claims he never did.

Carroll and his band members were headed to Omaha, Nebraska from Halifax, Canada where they are from for a week-long-tour of Nebraska.

As Carroll was filing his claim on his damaged guitar, he being pointed to various people to talk to ended up being passed around and re directed to various people within the organization and neighboring companies in the span of nine months. All in which moved the blame to some else in hopes that the disgruntled passenger would give up and move on.

After many failed attempts of talking to someone who would take ownership of the incident and after many disconnected phone numbers, Carroll wrote in his last e-mail that as a musician and songwriter that he would write three songs about his experience with United and how they have failed in taking ownership and responsibility for the incident. Carroll’s hope in doing so is that he would have one million hits on his first YouTube video in one year. Now he has over five million hits on his video.

I can totally relate with Carroll because even though I have never been a victim of damaged possessions by an airline company, I have witnessed an airline company not taking responsibility for sending more people than their airplane can hold with their luggage. My dad, Uncle and I went on a fishing trip last summer to Alaska and our destination was out in the middle of the woods and all of our camping gear was in our luggage. Since they boarded more people on the plane they knew that not all of our luggage could fit on the plane to make max weight limit so our baggage didn’t come in until a day later. All we asked for was the airline to compensate us with a hotel room to stay in for the night which they would not adhere to. Luckily both my dad and uncle are Attorneys and threatened to file a class action law suit on the company.

I feel that what it comes down to is honesty and integrity. Obviously United doesn’t have those characteristics very high on their priority list and is blinded by greed. I mean what is $1200 in repair costs for the guitar and having integrity to an airline company who makes millions upon millions of dollars a year?

If what Carroll is saying is true about not signing any waivers on his luggage and that his guitar was packaged properly it still doesn’t excuse the foul play of the employees “heaving” his guitar around.

It just amazes me how a company that brings in so much money could care less about their customer services and taking pride in what they do. I know gas prices are high and it takes a lot of gas to run those planes, but seriously? I’m glad that Carroll too the initiative to write these songs about his experience and put it on YouTube to make his voice be known because I’m sure there are a lot more stories like his and mine that go un-heard. Even though none of my personal items were damaged we still had to pay extra costs for the company’s actions.