Sorry for this rant, and if some of these problems have already been posted about before, without my knowing - I don't normally visit this forum as I don't fly UA very often.

I made some online reservations back in February for seven different itineraries this month and next month. I received email confirmations at the time, and I thought everything was fine until I recently got an email saying one of my flights had been automatically changed by UA. The change didn't fit my schedule so I called and they changed it to something suitable without any questions. All was fine, but I thought I'd check on my other flights...

ALL SEVEN of my itineraries had been auto changed by UA several months ago, but except for the one, they never sent out any email notifications! And get this, they changed two of them to invalid connections, ie. they had me departing on a connecting flight before my incoming flight arrives! This is a misconnect all on one ticket, not on separate tickets. I couldn't believe that an airline as large as UA doesn't even have enough IT expertise to put some simple checks into their system that would disallow such an obvious invalid connection.

Well, there were problems with each and every of the flights that they changed, ranging from mismatch to my schedule, or problems with connecting flights I had on other airlines. So I called up UA and told them that I had problems with each and every change they had done, and the totally incompetent agent couldn't do a single thing about it. Even the invalid connections couldn't be changed to anything valid fitting my schedule. It took forever to even try to explain to the agent that it was impossible for me to connect to a flight that departs 30 minutes before my arrival, unless UA has recently gone into the business of manufacturing time machines. The agent's solution was to attempt to book me on a flight that left an hour before my arrival!!!!

I had checked on both UA and ExpertFlyer ahead of time to verify that the flights I wanted had space available in my same booking class, yet the agent told me there were no seats on any of these flights. Out of 20 or more flights, not a single flight had any availability I was told. Complete idiot or liar! After telling him that each and every flight that he claimed there was no availability for showed as available on the UA website, he told me I should just go online and book the changes and then call UA back and I wouldn't be charged for the changes. Yeah, right, bozo - think I was born yesterday? I'm sure if I'd done that, and called back to UA, they'd tell me to go pound sand, and that I was stuck with all the additional charges. After spending over an hour with this fool, I finally hung up.

I called back the next day and asked to speak to a supervisor and explained the incompetent agent I got the day before. I spent another hour or so with her going over each ticket and got them changed to what I initially asked for, but couldn't get any explanation from her why the previous agent refused to correct them, even UA's blatant misconnections. Unfortunately I'm now stuck with some middle seats, because UA never informed me of their changes months ago when seating should have been wide open. But when I mentioned this, and it being 100% UA's fault that I lost my initial aisle seats, she said there wasn't anything she could do about it. I would have thought that at least they'd bump me up to E+ as compensation for their screw up.

Well, I had a fair amount of flexibility, and the new routings for most of my trips end up earning significantly more miles, so I'm not complaining too much about the need to reroute, but had my schedule not been so flexible, I would have been irate at their incompetence in changing my itineraries without informing me, like some 2-bit airline operating in a third-world country.

I'll be departing on my first of these flights in a few days, so went online today to make a printout of them all, and find again they made a change yet again without letting me know!

One further issue that points to complete incompetence in their IT department, the total travel time they show is all wrong. I normally don't even bother to check it, but for one where I was flying out of LAX and returning to LAX the next day, they had my total travel time showing as 25+ hours. Yet I arrived back the next day about 3 hours earlier than my departure the previous day, meaning the total travel time was something like 21 hours. I didn't really care, but tried to explain to the UA agent that there was a bug in their system, which was plainly obvious to see by that example. The idiotic agent tried to explain it away because I was traveling to a different time-zone. Hello, earth to UA, if you're departing from LAX and arriving back at LAX, it's the same friggin time-zone. The agent simply could not understand the concept that if you arrive back in the same time-zone, it doesn't matter what time-zones you pass through. I swear, the agent must have had an IQ less than 80.

I've seen incompetence before in various airlines I've flown on, but I've never experienced incompetence to this level before. I certainly hope the changes at UA to hire such incompetent employees doesn't spread from booking agents and IT people to their pilots.

Sorry for the rant, just had to get it off my chest about how low this airline has sunk to.