Originally Posted by
magiciansampras
I arrive at the gate and the door is still open. I ask the gate agent to print out my boarding pass as I just got off another flight and was on with reservations. She says "You're not even checked in yet, this flight is full." I explain the situation and she isn't budging. She says they just did a VDB to get people off the flight, they aren't putting anyone on the flight. I pull up ua2go.com on my blackberry and show her my itinerary with the flight listed. Still no go. I try the gate agent next to her to no avail. Then that agent closes the door and off the plane goes.
I had that happen at ONT about a year ago, just before UA discontinued the ONT-LAX flights. I'd come in on LAX-ONT (which had been slightly delayed), and was scheduled to fly onward ONT-SFO-IAD. ONT-SFO was showing a major delay which would cause a misconnect in SFO, so I called res and got them to confirm me on ONT-LAX-SFO-IAD.
The GA at ONT claimed they were oversold and couldn't take standbys. I said, "I'm not a standby; I have a confirmed seat on the flight and just need my BP." She tried to refuse up and down, and ended up making me wait until she'd boarded the flight before she could "see if she could help."
I called up my itin on my cell phone screen, too, when she insisted it was past the standby window and there was nothing she could do.
Finally, she typed away for a while (and ended up losing my spot on the u/g waitlist SFO-IAD) and gave me my BP, telling me it was the "last seat" and that I was "really lucky."
I got on the plane, and actually both the exit row 9 seats on the EMB-120 were open; she'd stuck me in 4B or something like that.
GAs are usually very helpful IME, but that one was absolutely not. At least it worked out in the end, though when I did get to SFO I'd not only lost my place on the u/g list but had lost my seat, too (luckily, the GA at SFO got me into a crew rest seat on the 777, which wasn't going to be in use by the crew for that flight, obviously). A redeye in an E- middle at the back of the 777 would have been a nightmare.
I've also almost had that happen on a protected flight ex-ORD; Mr. Chicken refused to show my itin and said "Please see a customer service agent..." etc. (no way in heck of accomplishing that with WX madness at ORD!) I finally convinced the GA at the gate for the second protected flight (the first canceled) to at least look at my itin, and she pulled it up and gave me my BP.
Hmm, come to think of it, an RCC agent did the same thing to me when I'd been protected onto a nonstop ORD-LAX when I'd been booked ORD-MSP-DEN-LAX. She flat-out refused to even call up my itin and give me my BP, saying it was "impossible" to have had the phone agent get me a seat.
Maybe this isn't as uncommon an occurrence as I thought?
Originally Posted by
magiciansampras
At this point I should have asked for a supervisor and requested IDB, but I was more interested in getting home, so I ran over to customer service to get a boarding pass on the next SFO-IAD flight. Of course the upgrade didn't clear and I was in a window next to a POS the entire flight.
So it seems to me that the 1K line put me on a flight that had no seats and was oversold. Should I have received an IDB?
Yes, you should have gotten an IDB IMHO, but UA might claim you weren't checked in, etc., and thus don't get one.
Personally, I'd write a concise complaint letter to UA about it.
I don't think you were put on a flight w/o seats, just that the GA screwed it up.