Originally Posted by
BamaVol
I don't know if this was posted somewhere upstream or not.
I have been increasingly frustrated by Silver Airways. I live in Panama City and United and Silver are new this year to our market. I do not have status but I have a load of miles with UA.
I tried last week to book a couple award seats ECP-BCN as soon as they became available online. Even though there is an ECP-IAH flight, every award route requires me to fly ECP-MCO, then LH to BCN through FRA. I tried booking a couple seats and got an error (no specific message). I called UA and an unfriendly agent told me there was no availability ECP-MCO, it would only let me book MCO-BCN. I finally figured out that Silver releases seats about a week behind United. So, I have waited for those seats to open up. Guess what, as soon as ECP-MCO opens up on Silver, the routes disappear from United.com. This sucks. Any advice?
For anyone who was interested, I sucked it up and booked MCO-BCN on LH. This means a 6 hour drive each way, but I prefer that to sitting 7 hours at IAH between flights. 6 hour drive + 13 hours flying = 3 hours less than leaving from my home airport. Also, I can sleep about 6 hours later: the ECP-IAH flight is at 6:10 AM.
I plan to avoid Silver Air in the future and hope they disappear from this market and are replaced by something a little better connected. I expect UA to suffer the same fate here eventually if they can't offer more than 2 flights a day to a single destination (already served by another carrier).