Originally Posted by
spin88
You looked long long long and hard, and could not find any e.g.s on DL or AS where people actually were denied a seat when they arrived at the gate by the published (15 min) cut off time or where the airline moved up the departure time and then (a) did not send e-mail/text, etc notice and (b) left people behind who arrived within 15 minutes of the last published departure time.
I didn't look long and hard at all. I did a quick Google search, which turned up the exact same issues on other airlines, exactly as I knew that it would. And you're splitting hairs on the "last published" departure time, because we have nothing -- not even an assertion -- to suggest that UA never published an updated time. In fact, the only evidence we have is that they did. The stories I posted were materially the same -- airline delays a flight, airline un-delays a flight, passenger misses flight, passenger is irate.
If, in my haste, I grabbed ones that you didn't like, you can feel free to re-run the search and find ones that you do.
UA isn't really any different about this kind of thing than any other US airline, which is the same point that ten other people on this thread have made.