skgolf91

Yesterday, April 13th, UA 956 5:55pm got cancelled at around 9pm after multiple maintenance delays.. My wife is 1K and used her miles for her mom in Polaris business. No pre-departure drinks, no other drinks or food while sitting on plane for almost 3 hours before they finally deplaned at 9pm. No one offered anything.. FA and GA didn't seem to want to help anyone and sent everyone to the Customer Service desk to rebook. MIL had to wait another hour to retrieve her checked in luggage and I picked her up so she can sleep at home instead of hotel. Ended up getting home at midnight. My wife was told she can call the 1k line since she has status and file a complain. What is a reasonable compensation here?

flyguy6

Is it up to the customer service agent whether to give miles or ETC? I wasn't given a choice.

Flying Machine

TCG

Hi,

I have an industry contact who attempted to fly on UA808 Tuesday April 3, and the flight was cancelled after several hours taxiing due to a mechanical issue.
He was put in a hotel and booked to fly 24 hours later on a new flight number but it turned out to be the same aircraft with substantially the same issue and cancelled again.
Again, another hotel until he was able to fly out on Thursday April 5 on that day's UA808.

UA did get him to his destination but with 2 nights hotel and 48 hours delay, but has not been proactively communicating any compensation or follow up recognition of their problem.

Is compensation to be expected in this case? or is this the type of service we should be expecting?

Thanks

flyguy6

Ok that answers my question. I was recently given a ETC but was wondering if I would ask for miles instead. I'd prefer miles since I can keep them from expiring.

transportprof

If you deploy the ETC effectively, you can generate miles from their use, and thus get both miles and travel credit. It doesn't work the other way around.

jiejie

deleted

WineCountryUA

There is no mandated or statutory compensation (such as in Europe EU 261) under USA laws (and appears not under China rules either) but it is UA's practice to provide some compensation.

The housing and food should be covered by the airport team and post-flight the passenger (generally by email) will be provided an offer or voucher for a future flight or miles if they have a UA MP account. It will be base on ticketed cabin and status.

If not email has been received (was an email address attached to the ticket) then you can try the UA compensation site or sending a message to United directly. See the wiki of the new thread for the contact info.
A double cancellation is such a rare event it will be hard to predict in advance what the offer will be but this clearly a case (based on info provided) where such an offer will be made.

Will merge this with the master Compensation thread where you can see offers for lesser situations.

Kmxu

bmr12

Premier Platinum. Booked a flight to the international gateway city (EWR) with a two hour layover. Mechanical delay at the origin causes a three hour delay resulting in a misconnect for a once per day flight. UA provides hotel and a whopping $30 in food vouchers for a 24 hour delay which covers little at EWR OTG. No proactive compensation is provided of course.

Upon complaining about the 24 hour delay to arrival at the final destination the compensation is $250? Seems light for a whole day-long delay?

fumje

Sounds in line with normal. Someone without status might have had as little as $100 or $150 in compensation. There is a funny ramp and plateau in compensation: small things get a seemingly disproportionately high credit, while larger things are only barely higher. If you complain more vociferously, you may (probably will?) get more. You also might form a reputation for yourself.



I forgot to follow up on this. The original email never appeared. After three or four days I emailed, and then there was a confusing back-and-forth, during which a new ETC was issued. OK.

fezzington

I'm way late on this but it should be near instant if the wi-fi works (heh ) and the Link is connected to it. If it wasn't, there is one step that FAs need to do when they hit the ground, and in all honesty, I've forgotten to do it myself before. Thats when things get messy and I'm not sure what happens.

fumje

Thanks for the insights. Hah, I think the wifi actually was not working—ironically that was not directly part of the issue—and who knows if the closing step on arrival was remembered. Personal moral: just set a calendar reminder for myself to check up afterward.

UAPremExecflyer

Another ORD-LAX with kaput WiFi ... another $125 ETC ... this occasion was on P fare ... last week Z ...

FTA

My ticket was booked under someone else's Mileage Plus account. I was offered an ETC for some issues. I asked if I could get miles instead and United replied saying no as I don't have a Mileage Plus account. If I signup for MP now can I then get miles instead of ETC? Thank you