threeoh

Thanks for bringing this conversation back to earth. It's so easy to dismiss front-line workers as "lazy" or say that they "lied", when in fact there are hundreds of complications the customer can't see behind the scenes, time pressure, plus ordinary variety human error. And yes, among the thousands of United GAs I'm sure a few are actually lazy or mean. But the far more likely explanation is it was an understandable and rare mistake.

There are some safety-related errors you'd like to see brought down to 0%, but for minor customer-service errors at some point there are steep diminishing returns for investments/procedures that would bring the error rate down to less than 0.5% or so. If a GA makes this mistake once every 200 flights, I'm probably ok with the tradeoff compared to the costs involved in getting the error rate lower.

Obviously sucks for the person who missed the upgrade (and the advice to ask GA/FA politely if it looks like a mistake has been made is good advice), but sometimes people on this board act like they've never made a minor mistake at work.

raehl311

The correct way to manage this situation is to page a flight attendant, claim you are #1 on the upgrade list, and take the seat.


Ok really if I was on the flight I would point out to a flight attendant that the upgrade queue hasn't processed and they should find SMI, J and give him his seat, but the first one sounds like more fun.

cur

i agree we should demand the best and not settle for mediocrity but i'm just saying what i tell myself whenever this sort of thing happens to me. because legally speaking, y = y, anything else is gravy. and tbh if i used a gpu on iah-syd and i was #1 and i knew for a fact there was an open seat...ughhh

that said with your second point i disagree, yes op would get nothing tangible except for hope that this can make this large complex organization ensures its front line employees follow procedure. i'd do it; four sentence email while you're seething during taxi lol. better to say something on a machine than do nothing imo

having known a few FAs with a majort network carrier similar to united, the SOP was that cabin crew were to never ever upgrade after boarding except in extraordinary circumstances such as after the door closes there is 1 open j seat and they discover 1 irrop economy seat.

onthesam

Such as GA was working hard but merely forgot; was otherwise occupied; was attending to a safety concern; stuck dealing with a faulty entry door to the jet-bridge; got distracted; had computer that wasn't working; was out of paper to print new boarding passes; dealing with a connecting pax that didn't make it and became last-second offload; everything @fastair noted, etc...

All of those potential circumstances don't necessarily entail 'laziness.'

notquiteaff

What would you write? Maybe...

"As a long time member of the Flyertalk United forum (link to my profile to verify credentials) I am a trained and certified expert in all procedures used by UA baggage handlers, gate agents, flight attendants and pilots. On a recent flight, UAxxxx from XYZ to ABC, I observed from my seat that another first class seat remained unassigned. It was of course my duty to verify that there were still passengers on the wait list for First Class upgrades. The only possible explanation for this scenario is that the gate agent was either lazy or poorly trained, so I wanted to make sure you are aware of this problem and take action."