I’ve had a weird recent set of experiences flying United and wanted to see if it was common. We used to live in a DL hub (have been Diamond for a while) and have never really flown UA… until recently when we moved to SF.

Two recent issues:
1) My parents were set to fly SFO -> KOA Hawaii. I noticed the the week before that the flight was half empty (great, less people during Covid). At 10 pm the night before their flight, we get an alert that their flight was cancelled and they got pushed to a later flight, losing 6 hours. The reason given was maintenance, but I will say I noticed that their new flight was quite full now at takeoff. Ok, coincidence - fine, but just yesterday…

2) My family (2 + toddler) is scheduled to fly SFO -> DCA next week (yay holiday travel). Randomly and with no emails/app notifications, we were moved to a much later flight and thrown in completely separate rows in the back of the plane - our toddler 3 rows behind us in a middle seat.

The most upsetting part is this: our original flight still exists! They just changed to a larger plane and now the plane was only mostly filled. I had to call to ask we be put back on our original flight that we got kicked off of and of course now the 3 of us are not seated in the same row (at least mom can sit with our son).

I think this is the worst I’ve been treated by an airline in all my days of flying, so I guess my question to all the expert UA flyers is: is this to be expected for the rest of our SF days?