United lying about flight delay {sitting on runway, phone agent not seeing delay}
 

Sitting on UA6255 from IAD to LGA. flight has been sitting off the runway at IAD for more than an hour and a half. United status says flight left on time and arrived 30 minutes ago in LGA. 1k line is unwilling to rebook me since they don't see a delay. Getting very frustrated at this point. Any ideas on how to handle this?

Are you connecting in LGA to another UA flight?

Flight status shows you are currently in flight, arriving about 70 minutes late.

And on top of that, it is chalked up to ATC as the delay cause.

"Lying"? What evidence do you have that UA is being deliberately untruthful? These are usually IT/comm errors.

Which is accurate. There's currently a traffic management program in place at LGA.

UA 6255 is flown by "Messy" air. United Express flights often don't show real time updates in the system (or at least the passenger-facing system),

I think what OP may have seen is flight status showing original planned times, despite him/her sitting still at IAD. I've seen that a few times, but my bigger frustration is when the crew goes silent. Sitting still for a great length of time with zero communication upsets me, and represents a lazy crew.

I don't see evidence of "lying."

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...33d4654051.png

No. Connecting to AC (UA codeshare) on the same 016 ticket.

Yep. Got updated after the flight took off. Just landed and taxiing

You are right. No evidence, just frustration and conjecture and I could obviously be wrong. We had 4 announcements from the cockpit regarding delays but no posted delays in app/site/system. Tried to get rebooked but could not do so since no delay was showing.

It did not show the full delay until after takeoff. It was posting estimated arrival of 10:05, even at 10:10 EDT.


edit: (respond to new post)

My understanding of this part is limited, but the agent may have trouble taking over your ticket to rebook you on another AC flight since the delay had not been finalised until you got out of ATC limbo. It presumably would have been easier if it was a UA flight.

In this case, I'd tend to attribute to incompetence rather than malice ('lying').

I think what you're witnessing is flight status for UAX is sometimes buggy compared to mainline.

Sounds like the real problem was a phone agent who wouldn't believe you. That would piss me off.

I think if the OP was connecting to another UA flight, the phone agent would just have protected the OP on another flight. Maybe cannot do that for a AC flight. A few times, I would have two flight numbers: my original one for if I still managed to get on it, a new one later for if I missed my original one. The phone agent would tell me that if I was in time for my original flight, I should let the gate agent know so they cancel the new one.

They can do this for an AC flight (non-award; purchased on 016). I do it when flying out of YYZ which is often a hot mess if you're taking the last YYZ-LAX/SFO flight of the day. I often get protected on the morning one.