Originally Posted by
jsloan
Welcome to FT!
First of all, United would have had to refund the charges.
Thank you! Knowing I have recourse makes it easier to handle gracefully and with less stress.
Incidentally, if this had happened to me, I would also have contact customer service and complained
I did fill out an online United customer service feedback form detailing our experience.
Why did you check in at the gate? What did you say there? Were you getting a seat assignment?
Yes, you are right -- we were getting a seat assignment not checking in (done via app). This BE flight was a late purchase. We were arriving SFO (our home airport) from another city in the evening and a few days prior had learned we needed to be in LAS early the next day and got this BE ticket (allowing 2 hours between flights). We did not exit security between the two separately ticketed flights. The first was also United, but not BE. This was our first BE flight.
Did your boarding pass say "Basic Economy"? "BE - No Carry On"? How did the agents know you were in Basic Economy in the first pl
The boarding pass says 'BASIC ECONOMY' at the bottom and "TSA PRE **Priority B" at the top. It does not say 'No Carry On' anywhere.
When the gate agent assigned us seats she asked if we had full size carry-ons and we said yes and that's when she said we couldn't take them on the plane and would have to pay to check them.
BTW, we were assigned two E+ aisle seats across from each other; much nicer than we were expecting! We assumed we'd get two middles far away from each other and that would have been perfectly fine for this short flight (and why we went for the inexpensive last-minute BE flight).
This was a flight where almost all of the passengers were connecting from over-the-pacific flights (Korea and China) and the gate agents were native speakers of those languages and fluent ESL speakers. Perhaps they don't see enough BE passengers to be familiar with the standard exceptions to the BE no-carry-on policy? Other than initially refusing they were polite and efficient.