Hi Flyers,

I'm a frequent United flyer (have almost 50k PQMs year to date~ not elite yet thanks to the stupid PQDs, but almost there), and have never written a complaint letter before but after my experience today, I feel I should get some sort of voucher due to how awful they were.

In short, my grandfather passed away and I got mislead and lied to by a phone agent who was incredibly rude and not understanding of my situation of needing to move my trip due to a death in the family. Additionally, the flight was hell (I swear they take away legroom by the day) because of delays due to improper baggage loading and equipment error. Where do you think is the best place to file a formal complaint and do you think I can actually get a voucher out of this? Any tips/advice?

Thanks
B

Sorry to hear about your grandfather. Hope you made it to wherever you needed to be on time.

Write United Customer Relations an e-mail succinctly explaining what was wrong (no more than one short paragraph per problem; no more than three problems in a message). State facts about how the company disserviced you. Add a note about how this made you feel and then explain what aspects of the service you would like them to improve in the future.

Expect to receive a form letter in two to six weeks; don't necessarily expect the response to indicate that the agent totally read your message, but expect at least a boilerplate "sorry you feel that way". You may also get a $75 electronic travel certificate, probably a high probability.

Depending on how much you value your time, you can also contact United Customer Relations by phone (the customer care department is 877-624-2660) and engage in basically the same process but by phone instead of by e-mail, possibly receiving a more empathetic response because it's harder to send form letters over the telephone.

Sorry to hear about your grandfather's passing.

Best place is to fill out the web form at www.united.com/feedback. It will have a place to fill out your basic info, PNR info., etc. (and will allow you to login to pre-fill out the info. from your profile like name, MP #, etc.).

Make sure you keep any complaint short and to the point - anything other than the facts are unimportant and will only take away from the legitimate complaints. Also, keep out snark and comments like "I swear they take away legroom by the day" which a, is not true, and b, will, again, only take away from any legitimate concerns.

I find using bullets if there are more than a couple of issues is a good way to keep everything organized, concise, and also easily differentiates between point a, b and c, etc. So you can start with a brief opening paragraph with info, say, here are the issues I encountered, go to bullets, and then close, potentially putting in what you expect from them.

It also may be a good idea to write it up in a program like Word, then copy and paste to a text editor (notepad, etc.) to strip out any code, then paste into the web form and submit.

Good luck.