Originally Posted by
BearX220
Come on. I am the last guy to defend UA these days but this is not fair. Some folks around here are sticklers for airline rules until, in some moment of emotional drama, they think they ought to be bent, otherwise the airline's a villain. All UA did was stick to its rules.
Kudos to the Southwest CSA for helping, but all she really did was help the young mom book a (fairly pricey $400) one-way ticket and pry a free hotel room loose for her. WN didn't donate anything but a little employee time. I am sure many demoralized / apathetic / hostile / etc. United front-liners would not do the same these days, but that's not "the airline" or an expression of policy. Some would. It was just the luck of the draw.
How did this get into the paper, anyway? Who called the reporter? The WN station manager, the Marriott guy, SJC management, or what? I doubt the teen mom was media-savvy or motivated to do it.
Originally Posted by
Bear96
I am really struggling to understand what people here think UA did wrong. From the article (unless I am missing something), it does not look like the young woman interacted with UA personnel at all. Rather, it looks like her mother picked up the phone and asked UA reservations to make a change that the ticket did not allow. She may or may not have shared the back story with the reservations agent.
Then the young woman happened to wander over to the Southwest counters. Who knows what may have happened had she wandered to a different airline's counter (UA included) instead.
Why is Southwest not being bashed for still charging her $400 despite her plight?
Kudos to the Southwest employees for what they did, but I don't see how this can fairly be made into a "UA bad" story (again, going by what is in the article).
The UA board is really pathetic these days. All most of y'all do is find any tidbit about UA out there and try to spin it by whatever contortions are necessary to make UA out as an evil monster that can never do anything right. Sheesh. Give your bile a break. Can't be healthy.
As I've said I don't think that UA did "wrong" but I do find it interesting that WN are able to generate good press from this kind of situation when UA generally generates negative comment. This is especially true given United's new marketing being all around the "X ... Friendly" brand value, and therefore their corporate PR team should be going all out to push positive "helping people out" type stories to the media. The fact that they're not speaks either to their poor media relations or poor customer service levels.
That said it would have been nice if UA had seen fit to put the mom and kid on standby for free (but not wrong that they didn't), it would have cost them nothing and gained some goodwill. Of course I'm not particularly a stickler for airlines enforcing rules, I think good service based on an individual circumstance is more important than maintaining 'fairness' through adherence to the rules.