I was supposed to fly to EWR-BOS-SFO yesterday on a UA award ticket but due to the following circumstances I am still in New York after full day spent in airports and planes:

1. Originally booked flight CO1120 from EWR to BOS was delayed from 8:30 am to 10:00 am due to mechanical reasons
2. I am rebooked to flight CO3215 departing to BOS at 9:45
3. I make it to UA177 flight to SFO but Continental had changed my reservation assuming I would not be able to arrive to the flight (why allow me to get on board on the first place then!) and not allowed in the flight since it was oversold
4. Back to CO, they tell me that the only way I could get to SFO that day was by flying back to EWR and then fly to SFO. I am rebooked in CO1105 connecting with CO348 that had a departure time of 6 PM. Flight 1105 first gets delayed by ATC and afterwards because of security Issues, resulting in an arrival to EWR at 17:55 and missing my connection
5. Continental rebooks me for Tuesday 27th of July, and I don't think it's even necessary to give any comments about this.

At that point I decided it was too much and decided to stop trying to fly, cancelled all flights and asked to have a taxi back to Manhattan

This was the first time I ever flew with CO and I don't know what I can expect from them after ruining my 4 day vacation. I live in Sweden and came for 3 days in NY and 4 days in the bay area, so really disappointed..

what to do? What to expect from them?
thanks for your help!

Wow, what an ordeal!

Re #3, did you still have a boarding pass for the UA flight? And when did you arrive in the gate area? If you had a BP, and it was early enough before the flight was supposed to be closed, I would go after UA and say they IDB'ed you. If CO cancelled the space, let UA duke it out with CO.

It is very rare that CO would cancel the original booking. We are instructed to add any new bookings (during IRROPS) onto the bottom of your PNR, just in case you make it in time for your original flight.

That being said, if you arrived at the UA gate before they consider you not going, you should have been allowed to board. It is not your fault that they were overbooked. Also they should not have sent you back to CO for assistance. At this point you are their customer even though UA doesn't like it.

Sorry you had such an ordeal.

Thanks for your comments, I was surprised by the GA in BOS when he said I had been taken off the flight by CO... I had been told specifically by their agents in EWR that they wouldn't offload me...

I think I will take the case to United as well...

If CO did drop it, I don't think it was manually done by a GA. I think their systems are weird and send messages to OAL's that they're not expecting.

I've been dropped off of OAL flights on CO tickets as well, once travel has begun. Even for random stuff on another day.

OP, any chance this segment was your fifth (5th) segment of your whole booking? That's the theory the CO supv. had when it happened to mine, as the 5th segment is the first segment of a conjunctive ticket.

Definitely sounds fishy on who did what...and if Channa is defending CO on this I'll take his knowledge on who is in control with a grain of salt and say go after UA on this one.

While I've been victim of CO dropping OAL segments as well, UA's oversale gives them motive. This witch hunt could get interesting.

Our system doesn't send any messages and I doubt that this flight was sent to the auto-rebooking program. The only message you will receive, from that program, is an auto-notification that you have had a flight change.

I think that perhaps UA didn't want to deal with the OP at the last moments of the flight, especially to take another oversale or pull someone off the flight to seat him.

Interesting points... I'm Premier Executive with United, and although I rarely fly them (i got where I am thanks to SAS), I must say that the attitude of this particular GA gave me a very bad impression on their customer service approach.

Just to answer some questions above... this was the second segment of the e-ticket... the first segment was EWR-BOS. I was flying on an award ticket, and I don't know if this could have an impact either on my priority to board and/or the compensation that I could expect.

I am at least expecting from United to have all my miles and taxes refunded.

I have requested to continental a proper refund as well, since it was because of them that I spent 10 hours traveling and getting not one mile away from where I had started that same day. My question is still how "proper" is defined in the US.

Thanks to everyone!

As of right now there seem to be enough question marks that assigning blame seems a bit premature. Maybe it was CO's fault and maybe not. Asserting such now - especially when several other feasible scenarios have been offered - doesn't make sense to me.

Plus there were two more EWR-SFO flights on Sunday night that you could have been re-booked on. Both flights, CO648 and CO650, had open seats.

Any reason why you didn't take either one of those?

they told me all flights on ALL airlines were full or even overbooked, and considering that I was going to be there only for 3 days, cutting it to two or one and a half sounded really bad...

I have to say that customer representatives in EWR and BOS were super...friendly, understanding and apologetic on the situation

Who is "they" and which customer representatives are you referring to? UA or CO?

They are Continental and I'm referring to Continental customer service agents too..

I wouldn't be so sure of this. CO's systems have sent messages to OALs before that have caused odd things to happen.