HongKonger

+1. Customer service in the USA is terrible.

Weatherboy

jetski1110, when you were denied boarding on Flight 90, did they offer you compensation...or did you just take the later flight to EWR via IAD.

I'm sorry to hear you were one of the gate-scanning-buzzed victims from 90. I kept refreshing my mobile boarding pass to make sure no funny business was happening with my seat assignment until the door closed on the plane. The passenger who sat next to me was doing the same; she was upset to see people crying and screaming as they learned, as you did, that they were getting denied by the buzzer....and didn't want to face the same fate.

ws8n

If the new UA is so bad, why are people still flying with them?

NWR

No, I got the TOD I believe about 12 hours before the flight when I noticed it on my check-in webpage. At that time I was about 25 on the list with a V fare as a Gold, knowing I'd get pushed way down eventually.

When the GA first announced they found a replacement plane, I used the kiosk to get a new boarding pass that reflected the new equipment and seat assignment. I suppose I could have just used my mobile boarding pass as it too reflected the new equipment, but I wanted to be sure.

bowdenj

Yikes - this is a scary thread and I'm needing to book a ALB flight on Monday and an option is:

03/26/12 537a IND - CLE - ALB
03/26/12 625p ALB - CLE - IND

$851.00 roundtrip and after reading this thread I'm afraid of UAL (at least for the next few weeks) potential issues.

Although since CLE is a CO city I'd assume all the staff would know the system and there wouldn't be any issues.

craz

STOP everything that happened to the OP and to Flight 90 out of LAX were CO flights manned by CO employees, and not by PMUA employees. So @ CLE you will be dealing with CO people and not PMUA employees by large.

bob_the_d

it depends. sometimes for work your corporate preferred carrier is UA and you're stuck. once in a while (although it's happening less and less) UA might actually be the cheaper fare. for better or worse UA does have one of the biggest networks worldwide and it might just offer a non-stop where you're trying to go whereas competitors don't (i may need to fly EWR-PVG soon and as far as i know UA is the only carrier other than MU that flies direct). i wouldn't say that flying competing carriers isn't a possibility but every carrier has its pros and cons. you just have to decide for yourself whether the pros are worth the cons.

although in this case the story is a pretty heavy con and if that happened to me i could see myself dropping UA entirely. though i've had a meltdown like this with DL before which is why i never fly them either and that just leaves me with AA and i'm not sure their network is big enough for me. who knows though.

haha i guess point being, everyone's situation is different and sometimes for different reasons people still need/want to stay on UA.

TWA Fan 1

I'm not saying that the current iteration of UA, in the throes of a complex systems integration, is doing particularly well.

But, then again, let's not take one IrrOps incident and blow it completely out of proportion.

Just because some of the LAX ground staff were unprofessional and nasty, cannot be reasonably extrapolated to indict an entire airline, the world's largest airline...

Yes, there are definitely some serious issues in the merger of the CO and UA corporate cultures, but this incident had no correlation whatsoever to any integration or merger issues, since it occurred on a PMCO flight, with PMCO aircraft, at a PMCO gate, with PMCO personnel...

jetski1110

They offered me $300 and wouldn't go any higher. Once I was told I would not be getting on 090 I really had no choice but to accept.

cordelli

Of all the issues in the thread, this is the part I have the hardest trouble understanding the way they responded. It was a delay hours long, to an aircraft that holds considerably less people. Why on earth did they let the junior staffers anywhere near that counter? It's not like people were not calling, not like people in the club were not asking about it. At some point, somebody there should have made the decision to put the junior people on the flights without issues, and get some experienced people behind the desk. Not that the outcome would have been different, but you don't come back after a problem like this and say you didn't move staff in who may have handled it better.

People don't know yet. I would bet that many people on that flight will consider another airline the next time they fly. Several posters in other threads have reported that due to problems like this that United is currently not on the allowed list for booking business travel.

Loyalty is out the door for many of the airline passengers now. The top level will probably remain loyal, but the lower level people just don't get the benefits to make it worth it for them to deal with the hassles. Not saying another airline will be better, but for some they probably feel it won't be worse, so it's worth a shot.

The new United has not yet realized this. They still believe they are the only airline.

alex_b

This is one of the nice things about flying out of Europe or on European carriers, they have a minimum standard which they need to pay in cash (well cheque).

I got EUR600 from Qantas when their A380 went MX, no fuss, no argument, just a short appologetic letter with a cheque. Perhaps time to lobby DOT for a similar mandatory scheme?

exerda

Interesting... as a 1K on a V fare, I was around 12th on the waitlist at T-24, then fell as low as about 35-37 within an hour of departure. Never got a TOD offer at all, and I'd been checking for one repeatedly.

Well, I take that back: at T-72, I started seeing a $0 buy-up offer, but when clicking it, I was always told by the site there were no buy-up seats available, and that instrument upgrades would go to waitlist only. Definitely still some glitches in the matrix...

I'd be curious if any other FTers were on UA 974 yesterday and what happened to those denied boarding. Sounds like you made it onboard a bit before me (I got to the GA not long after they called Zone 2 very prematurely)... I wonder if they got VDB or IDB compensation, or if UA just said, "Tough."

entropy

YEah but CO employees at CLE are the nicest in the system, so you won't have trouble there. Long live the hublette!

Worldbuilder

^ Yup. Would be very interesting to start a YouTube Channel...or at least a consolidated thread with links to the video/audio evidence.

craz

Havent flown thru CLE in yrs, but my pt was bowdenj thought theyd be safe in CLE since the employyes there are PMCO and I thought they assumed the problems @ LAX were caused by PMUA employees, when it was PMCO employyees @ LAX that were handling everything and caused the problems, and not PMUA employees