Originally Posted by
TonyBurr
The responses have all addressed the contract with UA and they did follow it and won't give you anything. I know it has been discussed quite a bit about holding a flight/seats. HOWEVER, you are talking about 12 pax's, the GA could see what flight they were on, where it was, how soon it would land, which gate it would go to, and taken that into consideration (before you start jumping about on how the world ends if they hold a flight for 2 extra minutes I have had inter Asian flights delayed because the FA's went to Starbucks before boarding). If there was true customer service at IAH they could have had electric carts at the arriving gate to get them over. The GA knew these people were not at Starbucks behind FA's but arriving on a delayed UA flight. Give me a break.
GA's don't make the decision to hold flights. That's made by Ops. And, yes, if there were 12 empty seats on the flight and all pax coming from one flight and it was possible to acommodate the wait without the crew timing out, maybe ops would have done it.
But, back to basics. There weren't 12 seats. OP specifically notes that the seats were sold. This means given to overbooked pax. So, the T-30 matters and it wouldn't have mattered if UA had held the flight 3 minutes or 30 minutes, once the inbounds missed the cutoff, their seats were gone.
All comes down to travel insurance.