Okay, here's a real request for ideas.

I recently flew to Australia/New Zealand on a UA award ticket. It was actually courtesy of Marriott Rewards but the way they handle the flight portion is by depositing miles into your frequent flyer account.

Anyway I was scheduled to travel AKL-LAX-DEN-MSN. The problem was that the flight from AKL to LAX originated in MEL and left about 4 hours late. I never got a straight story why it was late; one person told me it arrived late, another said mechanical problems, another said weather (though there weren't any weather problems within at least a thousand miles), another said they had to wait until the crew was legal.

Anyway, when I checked in I found out that we were going to leave about 3 1/2 hours late. At the ticket counter the United person said that we were going to misconnect in LAX so she told us we'd have to stay overnight in LAX and she put us on flights the next day back to MSN. She told us that someone from would be waiting to greet us in LAX with hotel vouchers.

When we arrived at LAX there was the usual mass confusion going through customs but there was clearly nobody to meet us with hotel vouchers. This was a full 747-400 with virtually everyone in trouble because of misconnects. For example there were over 60 people on the plane who were scheduled to continue on the same flight number from LAX to GTW; United, in their wisdom, had scheduled a plane change so the continuing flight had already left before we arrived.

Anyway, after 2 1/2 hours of being sent from line to line (I was getting stubborn; I should have just left and gotten my own hotel room) I finally got to someone who could make a reservation and give me a voucher. United customer service in LAX is an oxymoron! I know the United counter people were faced with hordes of exhausted people trying to deal with flight problems but the UAL folks were generally pretty ornary. By the way, I think I'm lucky - they told a lot of people that there weren't any rooms available so they were on their own.

The next morning we flew from LAX to ORD, then from ORD to MSN. The ORD to MSN flight was about 2 hours late, too, so I ended up arriving back in MSN about 24 hours late.

Now my question is whether it is reasonable to write United and ask for some kind of compensation. I know it was an award ticket but these were miles from Marriott so I assume there was some financial arrangement for them. I also realize that the contract of carriage only says that United will provide a room when they force an unscheduled overnight stay (which they did provide). But somehow this left me with a pretty bad taste.

Any ideas? Am I just being ornary? Or if I should ask for something, what is reasonable? A discount on a future trip so United can prove that they can do better than this?