How much would you put up with to avoid United Airlines?
United Airlines’ self-induced crisis last week lost the company points on social media, and dollars in its market cap. When choosing between two identical (and hypothetical) flights, people who said they had heard about the United news in recent weeks strongly preferred flying with another airline. The online experiment was led by Kyle Dropp, the chief research officer at Morning Consult, a digital media and polling company. For a casual airline traveler with no brand loyalty, we could expect this decision to come down to a coin flip, and for those who said they had not heard of the United scandal, it was: 49 percent chose the United flight, and 51 percent chose the American flight. The researchers pressed on this preference further, testing the strength of respondents’ aversion to United by making changes to the choice. A third did both these things, asking people to choose between a nonstop United flight for $204 and a one-stop American flight for $270. Companies like Kayak and Expedia probably have an early sense of shoppers’ habits but, for the moment, there’s little public evidence to go on.