ilovesprint

This is the best advice period. You shouldnt "Have Too" but you better.

I always double & triple check my reservations, especially after irrops. If you don't, you are inviting problems that could have been more correctable days earlier

z28lt1

I had the rest of my PNR disappear after a rebooking of a misconnect last month. Not sure why they struggle with rebookings so much, but they do. I do want to say, unlike the original poster who had a tough time, mine was handled very well.

I noticed the PNR was gone about 36 hours before my return flight. Called the line, and since I was in a noisy restaurant, the voice recognition couldn't understand me, so I got routed to a general agent. He rebooked the flight. When I asked for a seat, my aisle in E- was gone, and only middles were left. I asked to be placed in E+, and he first told me he was going to charge me. I explained (politely) that in 12 hours I could put myself in E+ for free, and since my aisle seat was lost due to United's error, I would think he could put me in E+ for free now, 12 hours ahead. He did so without further hesitation.

All in all took about 5 minutes (plus 10 minutes getting through the voice prompts. very frustrating when they can't understand you and don't even want to put you through an agent because he can't understand the word "yes" for domestic).

So United can handle this well. Sorry it wasn't for the OP and others. Now they need to figure out why they can't rebook people without issues.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

One piece of advice - always watch reservations, especially in case of IRROPs.

Bear96

I have always wondered this too. People say they have flown so much for so many years on a given airline, then have one bad experience and vow to never (or hardly ever) fly that airline again. Hey, if you give any company enough business, at some point you are going to have an off experience. No company is perfect, especially in a complex industry like aviation; something bad *will* happen at some point.

This is not to take away from the OP's experience, which sounds very frustrating. But if this is just one out of many trips over many years that went particularly sour, mabe it is better to take a big-picture view.

Luvs2snowbordbut1kSEA

Happened to me a few times... it really is unbelievable that this garbage is still going on. I find it a bit humorous, however, that some fans accept this level of mediocrity as the new norm.

Good luck with that.

vandalby

This, combined with the OP's message is interesting. My travel last week was round trip ORD-LGA out Wednesday, returning Friday. Got hit with major IROPS on Wed due to the weather, rebooked on 4 flights throughout the day due to cancellations. Somewhere along the way, my itinerary just went "poof" due to agent error with SHARES. Return trip cancelled out, seat assignments lost, the whole deal.

Fortunately, I was watching closely and able to hop on resolutions quickly when things slipped off the rails. Didn't get original seats, but for the most part found equivalents.

Still, it was disturbing in practice to watch. I'm guessing that it has something to do with legacy UA agents needing to manipulate SHARES, but I will say I went through lots of irregular ops in the pmUA days and never recall having entire itineraries dropped / eliminated.

Too bad to hear that this may not be as isolated as I thought. Note for all of us though: as soon as the rebookings begin, probably worth hopping on .bomb to make sure that everything is intact.

bse118

What happened:

A) UA got OP and wife to SFO - albeit delayed

B) OP and wife presumably enjoyed several days of planned activities in SFO during trip

C) UA royally screwed up OP's rebooking and caused major inconvenience on his return flight.

Did C affect A and B? No - ergo, the trip was not ruined (in my book). Did UA screw up: yes.

LTBoston

Instead of buying a whole new first class seat on American, why didn't you just take the buy-up for $249 and ask United to reimburse you?

bob_the_d

this. so much this. even when i expect things to go smoothly, i never ever go anymore without a paper boarding pass. in those cases when things go awry, at the very least you have something tangible you can point to so you can prove at some point you were supposed to be on that plane.

last week even though it was well past midnight i chose to stick it out for another hour or so to get an agent to print out a physical BP. i was on the phone and was rebooked in minutes, but of course the reservation couldn't be cleaned up remotely (big surprise there) so i couldn't print it out as a kiosk. it paid off as a lot of people had flights canceled and seats switched so of course their BP's disappeared off their mobile app. it was pretty awful. their irrops recovery is terrible.

sbm12

Sure I would.

I'd be annoyed, frustrated and all sorts of pissed. But I'd also know that I was getting home, that I'd be able to deal with the fall-out later and that there is no way being rebooked back on to the same flight, albeit without the upgrade, would ruin a vacation for me. Maybe that's because I've flown enough on enough different airlines to know that things sometimes go wrong and the agents do what they can to put them back right when that happens. Comes from living in the real world and knowing that no one is perfect and that they are rarely malicious. Mistakes get made, they get resolved and life goes on.
Yes, because by and large they are. The range of actual difference between "most hated" and "least hated" airline is virtually nil.

UA screwed up. That's quite clear. And then they did what they could to fix the situation. Perfect? Absolutely not. But if this is what makes a customer never fly airline XYZ again then pretty soon they're going to be spending a lot of time in trains, cars and boats.

craz

Ive had it where I was protected on a later flight but ended up flying on my original flight. Went to check in for my Return, no res,yep Shares KOed it since I didnt fly on the protected flight.Got lucky the rep I got was PMUA so she was able to get my flights back and gave me the last seat left in F, pity #1 on the WL who probably thought F was theirs as a slam dunk

LA2CDG

+1 to this, Im sure it was cheaper than buying a new last minute F ticket on AA. Plus be on the same flight as the wife.

as219

If you think this was the problem, then obviously you didn't read the entire OP...but I think this is pointed out above.

Roll out of the bed on the wrong side today, did we?

So we can only fault UA for doing X if and only if no other airline has ever done X?



This isn't that complicated: UA used to take care of 1Ks, but now it doesn't.

I used to be willing to go along with this. I looked at my "relationship" with UA from a bigger perspective. Yes, they blew it big time every once in a while (and no, I'm not talking about malfunctioning audio jacks), but I had confidence that they'd make things right in the end. A handful of bad UA frontline apples was more than made up for by the terrific frontline people who went above and beyond to help me get to where I needed to be. Part of that "relationship" was my willingness to watch my itins like a hawk, as if somehow it was my responsibility to make sure UA didn't summarily delete my return flights, cancel my seat assignments, or otherwise muck things up. It all evened out. Alas, things are different now.

It may very well be the case that any airline at some point is going to stick it to me like it got stuck to the OP, but in that case, what's the point of being a 1K?

MBS MillionMiler

I don't think anyone thinks F is a slam dunk these days! I could be #1 on the list with 8 seats left, 16 minutes before departure, and I wouldn't think it's a slam dunk.

exerda

The big problem here is COdbaUA's aggressive cancellation of downline segments when the system erroneously believes the first one to have been missed.

Yes, every carrier will cancel an itin if you skip flights (to help prevent hidden city ticketing, for one thing). However, on PMUA, either the systems were better at recognizing the pax had actually traveled albeit on different flights, or else waited to cancel the return trip for much longer.

This is a common and frustrating problem with UA's systems these days. Instead of fixing it, though, they're off clawing back miles they posted in error 13 months ago.