sbedelman

Good comments. Let me address them one by one as they are very insightful.

My first response to the OP is that you are a Million Miler and burning your miles, that's great - but how much actual purchased flying are you doing with UA these days?

Not much. I'm retired now.

The airline, correctly IMO, is more focused on current customers than past ones so waving that around isn't likely to get you anywhere unless it's accompanied by current status, as well.

Point well taken. But the airline and myself do have an agreement. Just because I haven't bought a car from BMW in a while doesn't mean when I do they can telll me they aren't going to honor the warranty.

Even UA believes the cancellation and reroute violated the Conditions of Carriage. One would think that would be something of concern to them in that they have a legal if not moral obligation to live up to their agreement.

One would think they would want to get to the bottom of that if for no other reason that it doesn't keep happening. That they are unwilling to give even their most senior agents the ability to contact someone in authority when there a a failure shows in my opinion poor judgement on managements part.

Either they don't trust their people or don't want to hear about problems or both.

Also, how did you handle the discussion with the CSRs? You seem a bit belligerent and frustrated in your posts, are you approaching the discussions in the same way? That is just a recipe for trouble and unlikely to get you any satisfaction.

I agree. My conversations with res are calm and cordial. Frankly the res agent has been wonderful, except that there isn't really a thing she can do at this point. The seats have been resold and she has no method to request that someone who has the means to deal with why the problem occurred and see about fixing it contact me.

Were you checking the status of your itinerary regularly on UAL.Com?

I was. Once every 3-4 weeks.

If so, when that little red type shows up you need to call immediately, did you?

I did within a few minutes. Unfortunately the change cancellation had occurred on Oct 7th and I didn't check until mid last week. By then the seats were goine.

Did they tell you when the schedule change occurred versus when you first found out? and how did you find out?

I only found out when I went to the web site and checked the itin. They never contacted me. Also the web site showed no alerts. Res confirmed that no message or any kind was sent to me.


Is the contact info you mention in your UA MP profile or actually associated with the itinerary in question?

Both.

Last, the comment about they sold "your" award seats is a lot of bs -- the call center reps have no idea whose seats are which and it's unlikely the cabin is sold out before travel day.

Well, ok. What I was trying to say was that the aircraft has a certain number of FC seats. UA cancelled our reservation and released our seats back into availability. One of those seats was subsequently sold (the res agent checked the date) so there were only 3 seats left if FC, one less than we needed to travel.

So perhaps a more accurate description is that the airline resold one of the seats for which we were holding a reservation. The cabin would be oversold by 1 if they put us back on our original routing. Since they won't oversell FC we are out of luck.

As I said all very good observations. I thank you. As I mentioned as frustrated as I am at the situation (because of all the work for both my wife and her patients to reschedule) I understand that mistakes both human and machine (since they are programmed by humans) happen. It is part of life.

The test of an organization is how it responds to problems and it is here that UA has failed miserably. All they would have had to do is have someone pick up the phone, confirm that in fact the reroute should not have happened, apologized and we would have been on our way to a happy conclusion. Bringing the guy online who is in charge of the system and having him say oops that is ugly and needs to be fixed seems reasonable too.

Good organizations listen to their customers, especially when they have something useful to say. I don't think there is a question that is the case here. Either the system is doing something wrong by cancelling flights without notification (and giving an opportunity to the pax to decide which way to go) or the system is correct in which case I suggest the policy of rerouting without notice is kind of dumb.

Either way one would think that the person runs this part of the business would want to know about it.

I wasn't asking to talk to someone for my ego. I just wanted to let somebody know there was a problem and it really hurt us and perhaps they should be aware of it and fix it.

What one can see from the CN column is that UA doesn't feel much need to fulfil their obligations under the contract they have with the customer (by for example treating tickets from awards differently from paid even though the agreement specificially says they are the same). It is a real eye opener to read the last sentence. Even with a national travel magazine involved knowing the results were going to be published.

In my case its exactly the same. Their own res people agree the cancellation never should have happened and I should have been notified, but the guys actually in charge just don't care.

There just isn't a recognition that what they say and agree to matters.