Use your smartphone and take a photo of the boarding pass as soon as you sit down on the plane. This is particularly important if you get a "new flight" at the gate because you wouldn't have any printout of that boarding pass from the original reservation. I have lost countless boarding pass stubs and if I had been in your shoes I'd have had to shell out $400. Now I take photos of my boarding passes. If nothing else, some day in my old age they will make an interesting photo album
Originally Posted by
2ndTOTY
Interesting experience with United's customer service today:
Flew from ORD to EWR a few days ago on standby after I missed my original outbound flight. Arrived safely, spent the weekend in NYC and returned to EWR today to board my return ticket back to Chicago. Upon arriving at the airport, however, I was told that my original reservation had been cancelled because I never flew the original segment from ORD to EWR a few days ago. Although I explained to the agent at the counter that I had been put on standby for a different flight, she couldn't ticket me because there was no record of me in the United computer system of ever having gotten on any flight between the two cities.
I was instructed to call United customer service where I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was lying (the agent literally told me that there was no way a computer error could produce this kind of glitch and that I must be misleading them about something) and after about a half an hour of yelling I was told that no, there was sadly nothing they could do and that I would have to buy a new ticket (at that point they cost about $400) back to O'Hare.
Luckily the story ends happily, I managed to find my original ticket-stub from my ORD-EWR flight and showed it to the ticket agent who was able to pull some strings with her supervisor to get me put on the next flight (by this point I had missed my original flight). According to this agent, this entire fiasco was the result of a computer error and was produced by the gate agent in O'Hare incorrectly entering my information.
My question to the FT community is what do you do in situations where customer service agents tell you that you're lying but you are, in fact, actually giving a correct fact pattern that conforms to the truth? If I wouldn't have been able to find my original ticket-stub I have no doubt that I would have been forced to purchase a pretty expensive return and it's a little troubling that this sort of error can happen, and even more worrying that the customer is not given the benefit of the doubt. Is there some number that you can call which has competent individuals manning the phone lines blessed with reason who won't say that you're lying in order to avoid assisting you or is the best that a paying customer can do is engage in a bit of cathartic yelling?
(Apologies if this isn't the correct forum--this is my first FT post, though I've been a reader for a while, and was at a bit of a loss re: where to post this.)
Last edited by Jade_BR; Jun 19, 2012 at 2:48 pm