The market has spoken....
 

Well, I guess I was sorely mistaken given the responses to this thread. I would have thought that more people would have been symapthetic to the cry for better customer service. The market drives business and if I was continental reading this thread I'd certainly not change my practices.

Thanks for showing me the light. :rolleyes:

Oh, I didn't miss it, I booked on United. :D

Enlightenment is a wonderful thing.

Customer service is the way forward, but airlines are not charities. There are reasons why walk-up fares are expensive. OK, it may have cost them less that you didn't go, but they could have sold those seats.

If airlines were to allow lower fares to be flexible (and to allow you to buy a lower fare even when it is no longer available), then, well, the lower fares would no longer exist.

Take your pick.

Here's another perspective on the airline's part, and I am NOT saying that you are:

How does the airline know you're not a scam artist trying to scam them?

How does the airline know you're telling the truth when you tell them you had made a mistake? It is highly suspicious for anyone not check the travel dates and attempt to correct it when they had the opportunity to do so.

How does the airline know that you didn't change your travel dates after making the reservations and are now attempting to scam them?

Customer service is what scam artists use to scam businesses out of products/services, and businesses know it; I have seen some pretty shady things in my time. And, businesses have a right to protect themselves.


Just call it a learning experience and move on.

I think the OP has a valid point and the other posters are being a bit unreasonable. If you make an honest mistake, as the OP did, the airlines, if they want to keep a passengers business, should try to do whats reasonable. In this case there was a flight the next morning with plenty of availabilty that they could have placed the OP on for a reasonable fee at no real additional cost to to CO or opportunity cost.

As a frequent traveler I make honest mistakes like these from time to time too. I am elite on AA and they have virtually always been understanding and accomadetng within reason. For instance, I have done what OP did before and after much pleading I was allowed stand by on next flight.

An example of unreasonable, in my opinion was F9 a couple years back where I thought my flight was at a later time and I arrived at the airport late, approx 40min before departure, to find an unmanned ticket desk, waited there for 10 minutes to have the F9 employee walk past on their way home an say that it was now less then 30 mins before flight so they couldnt give me a boarding pass. It was late night FLL so airport was empty and gate was probably about 200 yards away, so I asked for something to get through security. nothing doing. Flight turned out to be delayed so making the flight wasnt the issue, just a policy that didnt make sense in this case.

Since that day I have given my 125k+ miles out of DEN to every carrier except F9.

I agree with the peanut gallery here that comes down on people that want rules bent when they are unreasonable, but if airlines want to provide good customer service I think that reason and logic should trump rules. Especially when trips such asthese are missed they have great consequenses on the travelers, like missing weddings, etc and are likely to be remembered forever and recounted to family and friends causing many people to swear off doing business with them.

Any airline you fly, most of the time everything will be perfectly fine. Of course there's going to be complications every once in a while, especially when you miss a flight or change schedules or try something funny.
There's no reason to avoid the "majors" as the chances that you'll be fine are pretty much the same for any carrier. Now I know this is only my experience, but the only real messup I've had was on my one Airtran flight while my hundred DL/AA/UA flights have been perfectly fine.

Here is something to consider:

I bet you never see a complaint like this on the SouthWest forum. If you bought a ticket on SouthWest Airlines and you miss the flight, you can apply 100% of the value towards another ticket (read: no penalty). So, if the cheap fares still exists for the next day, there is no change penalty.

And people wonder why SouthWest has been profitable year after year and legacy carriers like Continental are losing money hand over fist.....

The cheap fares will not exist for next-day travel. The seat inventory may have low fare seats, but you will not meet the typical 7-day or 14-day advance purchase requirement for next-day travel.

Granted, the difference between the lowest and highest fares on WN is not thousands of dollars, but on the other hand, they don't fly to Leon, Mexico.

*sighs* Being a ticket agent, I have seen this scenario a few times (booked the wrong date). I have seen my share of customers miss their cruises due to not checking their email confirmation. It was not possible to put them on the next flight because there was no availability.

It is their rules. In many ways it is good customer service if they are following their rules, so that they are fair to everyone. If you like how United/American does it, then by all means choose them for your flights. Thanks to the help from Howard Hughes :) we have choices in flying internationally (see Aviator, if you haven't already!) All airlines are separate businesses. We all have different Contract of Carriages.

Moral to the story: Read your email confirmation closely as soon as you get it :)

Judging from my own (limited, I'm glad to say) experience with these matters, you're more likely to receive a satisfactory solution to this kind of problem at the airport than by calling the airline.

So you screwed up, and you're sorry CO wasn't more understanding of your screw-up?

Just last month my parents dropped my 20-year old son off at MYR an hour too late to catch his DL flight. They'd mis-read his itinerary and my son hadn't bothered to look at it. He realized he had a problem and spoke to the gate agent, who cheerfully booked him on the next flight out and put him on a later connection in ATL. No extra charges at all. My son has no Elite status with DL and neither do I. The OP obviously had a longer lag between his scheduled flight and his actual arrival at the airport- but here's a case where the airline actually acted compassionately when a customer made a mistake.

I used to be Gold on CO. Last year I took one trip on CO (MCI-CLE) and about 50,000 miles on the others.

JpMaxMan - you keep comparing a Continental paid airfare ticket to a United reward ticket. This is pretty much apples and orranges. While reward tickets may incur penalty for late changes or any changes, the actual miles paid remains the same and is not subject to advance booking and other restrictions.
OTOH, paid airfare is subject to a lot of things - mainly and mostly - time of booking. When you make changes at the last moment, you are subject to paying the highest airfare possible for the route and there is nothing much a Continental agent or supervisor can help you with. They simply cannot book you into your older airfare as it does not meet the requirements.
Also, you mentioned being late to flights before. This situation is different. Here you did not show up at the airport late but tried to settle this over the phone. Next time you should know that airport agents have much more power and can be much more flexible than phone agents. Phone agents must stick to protocol and will not get off it unless it is an extreme case of airline mistake - which is not the case here.

I'm sure that if you were booked on a paid airfare with United, their treatment was not much different than how Continental treated you.

"Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law; but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to confute him." -John Selden (1584-1654)

Using similar logic, I would say ignorance of your travel date is no excuse to bend the rules. I do believe if you miss your flight due to a flat tire, etc. Continental will put you on a later flight on the same day if possible, provided you call to cancel your original flight prior to its scheduled departure time. Personally, I do think "walk up" fares are highway robbery, but I guess that's all part of the game too.