Just when United thought its week couldn’t get any worse, it did.
After video footage of a man getting physically dragged off an overbooked flight went viral on Monday, the airline dug itself a little deeper with a victim-blaming apology. Since then, it has faced relentless backlash from customers on Twitter, in memes, on Reddit, on Jimmy Kimmel Live!… the list goes on. Now, you can add Yelp to that growing list of hostile territories.
The one-star hits keep comin’, interspersed with a few other reviews about unrelated recent travel—also mostly in the one- and two-star range. Out of the 777 (there’s a Boeing joke in here somewhere) reviews live on the company’s unverified Yelp page, it only averages a one-and-a-half star rating overall.
Yelp has recognized that the page is quickly spiraling out of control and has placed it under review while it tries to sort out who has a legitimate complaint following recent service and who’s just furious about this week’s headlines.
This is by no means the first time Yelp has combatted an influx of negative reviews surrounding a business in national headlines, though it may be one of the most prominent brands to do so: United joins the company of a restaurant in Hawaii, an out-of-business bakery, a mechanic, a prosecutor, and a yarn store in the cadre of companies flooded by one-star reviews.
One silver lining for United on this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week? Its stock price, which tanked hard on Tuesday in light of the viral video, had mostly recovered by Wednesday morning. That means it’s only down about $250 million in market value, as opposed to the estimated $800 million it had lost as of Tuesday.
H/T Elite Daily
