McTigerFan

Flew with spouse ORD-SFO Wed. Apr. 10. Booked return redeye April 14. The trip was part of a 25th anniversary celebration (ours) where we are taking a series of trips to make up for the times that biz travel has kept us apart. Because of work commitments for both of us on Apr. 15 we were very careful to be booked in first on return flight (Flight had R3 inventory when we booked it, and although I am 1K I had a GS friend upgrade us right away using his Regional upgrade instruments, 2 seats together.)

The trouble started on the outbound. When we arrived at the gate, the GA announced that the flight was delayed more than 4 hours due to lack of a flight crew (IRROPS due to bad weather). But... there was room for 75 of us on another flight leaving in 45 minutes.

Great.... called the 1K desk, had them change us to the other flight, and sprinted to the other gate. When we got there the GA said that the 1K desk had "done it wrong" but not to worry, there was still room on the flight. So he tapped away at his keyboard for awhile and eventually handed us two boarding passes. We got to SFO by 11 pm, a little late but ok under the circumstances.

But when I logged on to check us in for the return this morning, about 12 hours before the flight..... both our profiles showed no reservation at all, and the record locator "could not be found"! I immediately called the 1K line and they explained that on Wednesday whoever changed our flight had "done it wrong" (sound familiar?) and as a result, the computer thought we were still in Chicago and cancelled our (upgraded) return flights. I pointed out that we had both already received mileage credit for the Wednesday flights so obviously we were in SF and United knew it had brought us there.

The agent said the trouble was that the flight was now completely full, as was the other red eye to ORD. After a series of holds lasting more than 90 minutes, the phone agent was finally able to get my wife in first but not me. He couldn't even get me on the plane and started offering me connections through Houston or LA. When I refused he finally found me a middle seat in the back -- which given my early am work commitments I did not really want. He promised me that I would be in front of the upgrade list, shown as being in first as soon as space became available.

That also was not true. I went to check in online an hour or two later and was offered a buyup to first for $249!!!! I immediately called the 1K desk again and explained that that seat should be mine, and they claimed there was no seat to give me, that I would have to wait til i go to the airport.

The airport was no more helpful, and I finally bought a first class seat on American, went to terminal 2, and right now am posting this from first on the American redeye from SFO to ORD. I have my middle seat UA boarding pass with me, unused. I logged on to my wife's account and it shows that 20 people were upgraded on the flight (including her during the 2 hour phone call). Yet I was not given my upgrade even though it was confirmed two weeks ago and came from a GS member's account. Fare class was pretty high, too -- not Y but not deep discount either.

A compensation discussion awaits, but I can't imagine buying another ticket on United for a very, very long time. And I bought 100 tickets last year for myself and extended family. These problems run deeper than at almost any other company I have ever seen, in any industry.

mherdeg

Ouch, this sounds like pretty bad times. It sounds like you did almost everything right without being hyper-vigilant. (A hyper-vigilant lunatic would immediately have noticed that there was an useless leftover segment on their PNR and called in and demanded that it be removed or moved to the bottom to avoid auto-cancellation.)

What I always wonder about when people say this is as follows:

* If your expected number of terrible travel experiences is about 1 per 100 tickets flown,
* And you switch carriers and mark the old one as "dead to you" after one terrible travel experience,
* And you buy about 50 tickets for yourself per year,
* What happens after about year 10, when expectation says that you have abandoned every major US carrier? Do you stop travelling? Fly private? Cycle back to the carrier you abandoned after bad experience #1 and hope they've changed?

My sense is that for infrequent travelers, the probability of a bad experience on a particular carrier + the number of flights they are expected to take in their life combines such that the "I'll never fly X again!" strategy works fine, and that even moderately frequent flyers are only likely to hit "I'll never fly X, Y, or Z" at most. But for folks who routinely book a lot of travel, I think the strategy has gotta change -- either you take some smarter game-theoretic approach (tit-for-tat with forgiveness?) or you settle and cynically accept that you're doing business with a mediocre partner in a dinosaur-like business.

lhrsfo

Interesting theory. I think the real question is how a company recovers from service failures. We all know that stuff happens, and also that stuff often doesn't get sorted out in the heat of the moment. However, we should have a reasonable expectation that, after some escalation, errors shouldn't be compounding and that, after a lot of escalation, it should get sorted and that the company will be entering pro-active mode.

UA used to be quite good at this. An awful lot of stuff happened and they spent an awful lot of time was sent extricating themselves and leaving the customer happy. My sense is that less stuff happened on CO and therefore less effort was spent extricating themselves. Now, just as much, if not more, stuff happens but there is less authority simply "to do the right thing". I have no idea, but perhaps the competition is better at this.

halls120

during my years of flying pmUA, we had one vacation rescued by the heroic efforts of a UA CSR in Chicago, another rescued by a 1K agent somewhere, and I had one business trip rerouted in advance. Three events in 10 years, and every event was testament to United's dedication to customer service. Post-merger, except for a GA at IAD who made sure all her international passengers were properly rerouted following an IAD-ORD mx issue, I have no confidence the Pre-merger service will ever be the same.

Darlox

While I have nothing but my own anecdotal evidence to support this, I think there must be some "common error" committed by agents at ORD.

I'm mid-trip right now, and nearly didn't make it at all. Weather cancelled my first segment, but there was space on an earlier much-delayed flight that hadn't left yet. Club agent changed me onto it, and in the process somehow blew away the rest of my PNR. Poof!

Took 1.5 hours with another agent and someone on the phone from the help-desk, and they couldn't even see that my flights had ever existed. They ended up re-booking me on my Int'l legs from scratch, which fortunately still had capacity. I lost my seats, but at least stayed in the same cabin -- which was very very close, as I got the LAST seat in C.

A month ago, something very similar happened with my wife and I going to Europe, though fortunately while UA lost our segments from THEIR records, SAS still had a record in their system and were able to check us in for our connecting flight...

Long story to basically say: This is happening way more often than it should. Something about changing your originating segment to an earlier flight is fraught with potential problems, and (in my personal experience) ORD has a 0% success rate...

sbm12

Having to sit apart (and one in Y) on the return portion of the vacation ruined the trip?

No doubt the reservation got screwed up when the initial change was made. Good thing that never happens on other airlines. Ever.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

? Your upgrade was not confirmed for that particular flight. Your confirmed upgrade was for another flight. You can't just transfer a confirmed upgrade on one flight to another flight. it doesn't work that way. The 20 people that were upgraded were probably upgraded before you were trying to get on. Are you saying they should take away an upgrade from someone else to accommodate you? Maybe if you were an actual GS. I can definitely see some compensation for the cancellation. Not getting a First seat if none are available is what it is. And your buddy certainly should get his RPU back.

JNelson113

And that is the crux of the issue. PMUA took care of its customers. It's not that things didn't go wrong, but when they did you knew that UA had your back and would fix things quickly and courteously. Now I do not have that trust and faith at all.

bob_the_d

i completely agree. i've had issues myself like this last week at IAD due to the storms in the NYC area. i completely understand that weather does play an issue and those are issues that any airline just cannot control. they can, however, control how they react to it. i won't go into detail but it involved an 11 PM diversion, running out of fuel, 2+ hour waits at customer service, no hotels issued, and a 2.5 hour delay the next morning because of a "missing crew."

and that still confuses the heck out of me how i've been on so many flights where the GA's announce that they "can't locate their crew." and we can overhear them on the bat phone they use trying to talk to back office staff to locate the crew... and you can tell they really just don't know where they are and they don't seem to be just making it up. that astounds me. my crew is mid-air on an inbound flight? they are stuck in traffic making their way to the airport? they had to reassign another crew and they are currently somewhere else? i can understand that. but in 2013, how does an airline just not have any clue where they are? you'd think an airline would know if they're on one of their planes or if they're on the ground that they can just call their cell or something. it's mind boggling.

MBS MillionMiler

I think you need to re-read...

How I read it was that he was originally booked on SFO-ORD on flight# BBB. He checked the reservation on line the day before travel, and the confirmation was not to be found. He called the 1K desk to get put back on flight# BBB and found that his confirmed seats in F were given away--not just the upgraded part, but the whole return trip--vanished into thin air because of no wrongdoing on his own (other than obsessively checking the itinerary at all hours). They could only get his wife a seat in F on flight #BBB and a middle coach seat for him on the same flight# BBB.

Not sure how his upgrade 'wasn't confirmed' as you mention above. Clearly another case of SHARES falling apart and the absolutely STUPID rule of cancelling an entire trip, even if the computer system "THINKS" that you didn't fly a segment, when indeed you flew one. If anything, his confirmed upgrade was indeed taken away and given to someone else, presumably 2 of those 20 names on the 'confirmed' upgrade list...My guess is at least 2, perhaps more of the people upgraded were done so at one of the UG windows, or at least sometime prior to departure or after the OP had CONFIRMED his seats in F.

UA-NYC

Don't think you'd be so snide if this was *your* anniversary trip

FlyWorld

It hurt to read your story. I know your frustration all too well. Especially in relation to suffering from incompetence *AND* being lied to.

All I can say is: You are not alone.

This message has the tone deaf lack of emotional understanding that I'd expect from the current CO management team.

I think you have totally missed the point.

Is there a reason you choose to ignore everything OP wrote and just focus on one of many points that OP made, ignore the rest, then use that to build a straw-man argument trying to make OP look like a fool?

And, are you really, truly, suggesting that COdbaUA is just like other airlines?

Have you failed to notice that, by every credibly published measure in the country, they are the most hated and worst performing airline? They are the bottom of absolutely every list, by absolutely every measure.

There's a totality of this situation - a totality of what OP experience and a totality of the disaster the COdbaUA has become - that your snide little drive-by comment completely ignores.

Often1

Numerous threads about this on DL too. Regretably, there are two ways to avoid this problem in IRROPS:

1. Confirm w. whoever physically issues the new BP's that the remainder of the itinerary is properly intact and ask for a physical print out (even if you toss it).
2. Call in upon arrival to confirm that the remainder of the itinerary is intact.

Should you need to do this? No. Should you? Yes.

Once seats are "gone" they are gone.

channa

If you want to fly United, you really need to be familiar with their quirks of their system.

SHARES is extremely ruthless about cancelling flight if you no-show a segment. So when you get rebooked, if they leave anything you're not using in there, and there are segments below it in the record, those segments are in jeopardy.

I always audit my record after any change. I can't tell you how many times I've loaded up my record while walking away and have have had to call the 1K desk to clean it up to my satisfaction simply to avoid the situation you described.

As for getting you on the flight, they can do a lot more than they did for you. They can always force you into First and oversell it. I would have pushed for that as a remedy since you were confirmed in First already.

Then they can bump someone (or you) down and compensate them if everyone checks in, or they'll end up being okay if someone cancels.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

My bad - you're right - thought he was being rebooked on another flight.