Continuing my theme of "United definitely DOES NOT have its groove back"...
I had the opportunity to have three more days of (not so good) travel this week.
Monday LGA-IAH 330pm: our gate assigned as C11. New United app gives us all a pop up that the flight was moved to C7. However, C7 is trying to board a very late LGA-ORD flight that is about to have crew time out issues. That plane finally pushes at 3pm and our IAH plane, which was sitting on the tarmac waiting for C7 to open, finally pulls up and unloads the passengers. My LGA-IAH flight finally boards at 330pm, our departure time. Meanwhile, C11 was empty the entire time. No idea why they left C11 empty and delayed the flight to IAH when they could have gotten it out on time if they used an empty gate. (PS - the change to C7 was done well after the ORD flight was already at the gate and delayed due to ATC). Maybe LGA staffing issues that day.
Wednesday IAH-DEN 235pm: the inbound plane switched three times on the flight from the day before. Ultimately we are assigned an inbound from DEN which is arriving 2 hours late. IAH-DEN leaves 40 minutes late and arrives over an hour late due to weather en-route that we had to fly around. Luckily my connection was originally 3 hours so I had plenty of time to make my connection but a lot of people missed theirs. I don't blame UA at all for the weather, but definitely for constantly switching the inbound which caused the original delay in the first place.
Friday SJC-DEN-LGA 810am (through flight): plane arrives the night before. Boarding time comes and goes. Captain comes out and tells us one of the three hydraulic systems is broken and since SJC is a non-hub they have to wait for a contract mechanic to come in and fix it. I immediately got on the phone with the 1K line and had the easiest ever rebooking on OAL I've ever had over the phone. Ticket moved to DL, I flew via SLC and made it to NY 2.5 hours after my originally scheduled time on UA. I did wind up in JFK vs LGA but that's neither here nor there.
So, 100% success rate of something going wrong on every single itinerary again this week. I wonder what next week holds.
-RM