eng3

Agree, however, whether or not it is obnoxious isn't at issue. If this was a "service" that UA offered to GS's in the past but now does not, then the OP is at least partially correct.

bocastephen

I don't recall if PMUA ever offered "throwing undesirable customers off flights and out of seats at the demand of whiny, petulant GS members" as a product feature, but I don't see this service listed as a GS benefit today, so a GS member should have zero expectation that a non-GS customer will be bumped or moved at their behest, no matter how loud or whiny the tantrum.

Ari

No; I presume a yellow-scarf GS agent was involved in the first place because, well, why do you think? And that agent went above and beyond. This post was in response to a thread about GS service. This service was from a GS agent. I've also had great service in places with no status. I presume the item would have been left at baggage claim for me to pickup otherwise, possibly with a phone call. I doubt a UA agent would have met me curbside and abandoned other duties-- but when part of your duties are to go above and beyond for a certain subset of customers . . .

If you want a great no-status lost item story from AA, try my father's story from Guayaquil (gateway to Galapagos). He left a book in his seatback pocket using his boarding pass stub as a bookmark. (This was a roundtrip ticket-- and in those days AA still used magnetic stripe boarding passes and kept the big portion of them). He just never sought the book back-- it was just a lost book-- he could buy another one-- why bother. Upon boarding his flight back to Miami, the Guayaquil gate agent handed him his book, unsolicited. I think that was pretty cool. But no one abandoned their workstations for that.

And I assure there is a 'GS' for National, we just don't know about it and it is super-exclusive limited to CEOs of fortune XXX companies that do $X with National.

WineCountryUA

Before things get too far in the weeds, this seems to be the two items the OP was concerned aboutNot agreeing or disagreeing with there above but I don't see any comments about "getting others thrown off the plane", not sure where that came from.

UA_Flyer

GK_ORD

John Aldeborgh

None of us has to fly on United or the horrific little plane. If there are other options that work you should take advantage of them. It's schedule that drives my travel, and I've flown many planes and airlines which I would rather not in a perfect world. After I retire in a couple of years I will have the luxury of picking the day and time that I travel, until then I'm a slave to the needs of my customers.

wanderingkev

I would never consider requesting somebody be moved because of a seat preference. I am sure when I have been re routed by UA that someone may have been dislodged on the way but I was never involved. My two examples that I am aware of are....
- I was recently rerouted with a FC class ticket, the cabin was full on my re route and I heard the GA's saying they would pick some who had upgraded to put back in coach
-Years ago I made an epic mistake ,despite having a 3 hour connection from INTL I got lost in my work ,realized my error and got to the gate at ORD with plane pushed back on the tow truck.I apologized to the GA, owned up to my mistake and asked if she could re book me for the am as it was the last flight of the day. She got on radio, the plane came back to gate, after a few mins down the jet bridge she came an got me and put me in my original FC seat...... no one said anything other than a who the hell are you from my seat mate but I really felt the hate on that flight

silverforumsurf

wanderingkev

That was in a different GS world than today, they may do it if there is enough people running to connect , but with pressure on the departure time metric
I think the days of pulling the plane back because a dope was not paying attention are long gone

ttuna3

I doubt this would happen now but I had a similar experience to wanderingkev.

About 20 years when the first SMF to SFO puddle jumper was late because there was a light out in the cockpit that they hadn't fixed overnight. Of course they didn't put me on one of the flights that left before we actually got out. The GA at SFO hadn't closed the door yet for the last flight to NRT and just said "You're late, too bad, I'm not going to rebook you.." Fortunately for me (Unfortunately for him} I was on Navy orders and when I called the Navy Travel people they got right on it and told me to hang tight while they fixed things with UA. Door closed, plane pushes back and then I saw a baggage cart whipping across the apron doing about 60 and the tug heading back to the plane and re-hooking up to pull it back in. GA gets a phone call, pages me and hands me a new BP (upstairs) with a rather snarky "I hope you're happy now." Get to NRT and there's one of the ladies waiting for me to expedite me over to the ANA connection. She told me that the Navy had called UA Ops and told them that if they didn't make arrangements to get me to the ship on time it was going to cost the $100K for not following through on a must travel ticket, and that Ops had called SFO to make sure that I didn't miss the plane.

Found out later that there a great deal of heat that hit SFO and SMF (along with a couple of other stations) about making sure that this kind of thing didn't happen again since this was not the first time that UA had pulled a similar stunt and the Navy had gotten sick and tired of holding ships and having to pay the port charges so they put their foot down on UA to fix the problem.

STS-134

Well, in fairness, UA also used to offer meals on every flight, free checked bags for everyone, prizes on their mainland to Hawaii flights via a "halfway to Hawaii" game, etc. They also used to have WiFi on exactly 0 of their aircraft, all entertainment used to be via a large screen that passengers had no control over, and (this last one was way before my time) smoking used to be allowed on the aircraft. Things change, whether for better or worse. When things change, we should adapt. Do we expect that, with all of the information available at our fingertips on smartphones, we can't proactively look at the weather and book ourselves on a new flight if our original routing is threatened? Or just, you know, check the status of our flights starting 3 days out, to make sure they're still on schedule? Many years ago, the National Weather Service did not publish all of its forecasts publicly on a website.

My parents got screwed by HA a couple of years ago flying OGG-SFO, when their plane went MX. They had to fly a part in from HNL, which took a few hours (they let the pax back into the terminal at this point). Then the crew timed out, and they had to first unload fuel and then fly to HNL to get another crew. By the time this was over, they arrived at SJC at around 4 am. It was one of creeping delay situations. I told them, next time this happens, call HA and book yourself onto the first flight to SFO or OAK. HA isn't going to tell people they have this option, because they can't accommodate everyone on those other flights, so you have to be proactive. Lesson learned for them. And likewise, hopefully for the OP in this case.

lilpisher

Ari

GS should proactively priority-re-book and reach out whenever a GS member's flight is cancelled. Period. End of story. If that process is automated, so be it. That didn't happen in this case. We are talking are talking about service that is supposed to go above and beyond here, not service for General Members.

STS-134

Except we don't know what the load factor of those other flights was, how many seats were available on those other flights, and I didn't check to see how many of those other flights were canceled or in danger of being canceled. It could be that there were so many cancellations, they just didn't have enough seats on the remaining flights to accommodate everyone, AND all of those flights may have been in danger of also being canceled.

That said, I'm not sure what the OP was talking about. OP reported on 1/30, at 6:19 pm (Pacific time) that he or she "just found out" that his or her YYZ-DEN flight "tomorrow" (which would have been 1/31) was canceled "more than 24 hours in advance". From this, we can infer that although it was slightly more than 24 hours in advance, it could not have much more than 24 hours. UA in fact runs two daily flights from YYZ-DEN: UA 1799 (7:55 am departure) and UA 1939 (4:00 pm departure). I'm not sure which flight the OP was referring to but from the language used ("just found out" at 6:19 pm which would have been 9:19 pm local time by the way) we can guess that it was likely UA 1939, departing at 4:00 pm. Now, I'm not sure exactly at what point this flight was declared canceled, but inspection of the records on flightaware reveals that both UA 1799 and UA 1939 *did* actually fly on 1/31. So all the OP would have had to do was take the original flight. It was late, but it did take off from YYZ, and did arrive at DEN. https://flightaware.com/live/flight/...110Z/CYYZ/KDEN As for UA 1799, it took off and landed on time.

Furthermore, SDC is only possible on a UA metal itinerary. United Express carriers like OO and YV do count as UA metal for these purposes, but AC obviously does not. There are only two UA metal itineraries that depart after 4:00 pm: one via ORD and one via IAH. Both are on UA aircraft on both legs. Let's assume that ORD is out, with the polar vortex bearing down, as that would have a high probability of just causing more problems. IAH...maybe. But was that flight actually canceled at all? It looks like it went out, a little bit behind schedule, but it was probably the best option to just take the original one.