chavala

bhunt

I remember a few years ago on TMZ. They were interviewing some actor/singer leaving LAX and she said her United Host made the impossible happen and got her entire entrouge on a sold out flight to make award show that night.

fahrradman

This. The whole situation gives the appearance that she was booted out of first to make way for a congress-critter. United offered a perfectly plausible explanation for what happened. Although one can question United's credibility w.r.t. it denying special treatment to political figures (Chairman's flight anyone?). When offered compensation, she made a counter offer (would have as well). Eventually United hit her bid ($500 voucher, not sure the time line).

From her FB page, she actively shopped the story around. WaPo decided to take a pass on it. Her words from FB.

I think WaPo nailed it. Too much ambiguity. Did United evict her from FC for a congress-critter, probably but I don't know for certain.

rufflesinc

Same way they give the GS status to decision makers at companies that still have ethics policies against accepting these gifts.

DelrayChris

This is pretty pathetic. UA can easily go in to their back end systems and see what actually happened. Hopefully, someone with access will leak the logs and other information.

kale73

Then, later in the same post:

If points aren't "paying", then why would "forking out that many miles" for a substandard seat disappoint you?

WineCountryUA

Topic Reminder

The thread topic is a passenger believing they were inappropriately removed from a flight and then provided an E+ seat instead of their booked first class award seat. And the passenger's believe this was so UA could curry favor with a US congresswoman.

Some recent folks have gone into topics much outside the scope of the UA forum and into OMNI territory-- so in a desire to keep this thread open in the UA forum, the OMNI / political / non-UA related content has been removed.

Let's focus on the thread topic. If you wish to discuss those other issues, you are welcome to have that discussion in one of the OMNI forums.

WineCountryUA
UA coModerator

MatthewLAX

My two cents--

I had a long conversation with United yesterday and published a follow-up post today on my blog.

UPDATE: United Insists It Did NOT Boot Woman From First Class for Congresswoman

United shared with me screenshots from SHARES and walked me through where SHARES indicates the reservation was cancelled via the mobile app. Obviously, that involved translation of coding by UA that I will have to take their word on, but it seems 100% clear to me that United (corporate) did not sanction this. I do believe it could have been a gate agent or GS agent, but that's merely speculation...

I'm sorry I cannot publish pictures from SHARES. I'd love to have all of us dissect it.

In my many years of flying United and many irr/ops conditions, I've never cancelled or come to accidentally cancelling a reservation. Can someone, perhaps someone who is experiencing irr/ops today, walk me through on the app how one can inadvertently cancel the remaining segment on a reservation, at least without rebooking another segment? How does the record totally disappear?

And yes, if you read the post you'll see several follow-up questions to United including the question someone asked above about scanning in at the club.

joe_miami

During IRROPS, an option appears in the app to cancel the remaining segment(s). I always figured it was distance-limited — e.g., makes sense one might want to cancel LGA-ALB and drive, but it's hard to believe someone en route from Guatemala to D.C. would want to cancel while a thousand miles from home — but perhaps not. Perhaps these sorts of "cancellations" aren't true cancellations, but, rather, a way for pax to simply offload themselves from a delayed flight until they can see an agent and get things sorted out. A lot of the usual rules seem to go out the window during IRROPS, so it's not like UA is going to leave someone a thousand miles from home because they clicked the wrong button in the app.

Regardless of all of the above, just last week I had my record disappear entirely from the UA app during IRROPS. I flew POP-EWR, then my connecting flight was delayed for a couple of hours. The app kept me posted, but then, around the time the flight was originally supposed to depart, the whole record disappeared from the app. I manually reentered it and my printed boarding pass still worked, but I did get extra screening when entering the A gates after hitting the lounges in B; not sure if that was just random or because of the record glitch.

The SJL incident seems much more likely to be a case of user error and/or poor IT than a case of someone at UA deciding to screw over this passenger.

--

[Moderator edit]

joe_miami

Just read the blog post and saw the follow-ups you sent to UA. The first question doesn't seem to make any sense:

Definitionally, a rebooking wouldn't be considered a "cancellation," would it?

As mentioned by several people above, the above is incorrect.

As for question #4 :

The woman claims to be UA Gold, doesn't she? If so, it wouldn't matter if the connecting flight had been canceled. She would have had arrival access to the UC as a *A Gold traveling on an international flight that day.

iadisgreat

Without seeing the screenshots (sans PII or corporate secrets), I don't really believe UA.

cornfedcowboy

I believe they get to earn and keep their miles. I know a U.S.Senator that had two million skymiles.

halls120

SandmanDFW

No doubt at all that a congress critter, known for being horrible to her staff and the public bullied her way into that FC seat. None. At. All.

That being said, I honestly do not believe United. They lied to me and told me my flight was cancelled as I saw it push off the
gate and take off. I stood patiently while the gate agent told me it was cancelled. Sorry, babe, but I saw you load the entire flight.
I called a Continental person I knew and was placed on the next flight. Surprised they didn't try to tell me that one was cancelled.

SandmanDFW

Unless you have lived in Houston and know SJL's bad reputation, you don't have much room to say that.