Is it always this bad?
 

I've only flow UA once in the last 12 years or so.
We spent 12 hours at EWR recently trying to get a flight to London for which we were booked in Premium Plus, with Premier Access on our boarding passes.
The flight was ultimately cancelled. After 55 mins on hold I got through to a UA agent who rebooked us for 2 days later, and told me it was still PP seats.
Fast forward to checking in online - the seats are regular economy.
Called UA, 1h8 mins on hold and then agent tells us there is no PP seating on that flight, that's why.
Called UA again, 55 mins on hold. Agent tells us there is PP on the flight but it's full. We ask about getting PP on the flight home, they say it's full. I go online to see it's not full, they have seats. They then say they will put us in PP but put us in an economy plus seat. When I point out it's Economy Plus they keep telling me it's premium plus.
Another 55 mins on the phone and we speak to a supervisor who again, says they can't give us the seat class we've been booked in since Feb. They can't put priority bags on our luggage (like we had for our cancelled flight).
Is it always this bad? Are they always so slow to take calls, and have no discretion at all to help? Is it only the passengers who fly this roulette game every week and have thousands of miles racked up that they help?

You're caught at the unfortunate confluence of four circumstances:
1. Flight disruptions at EWR due primarily to weather and inadequate air traffic control staffing and overall airline dysfunction;
2. Extremely heavy flight loads to Europe;
3. Inexperienced UA phone agents who are not empowered to provide meaningful assistance;
4. UA selling a cabin (premium economy) that it does not offer on all widebody aircraft, and then totally failing to take care of the passengers that are affected by cancels and/or aircraft swaps.

It's the last two of these, particularly the last, that are fully within UA's control, and they are behaving despicably in taking passengers' money and then not providing the product that was paid for.

I encourage all who have been victimized to complain to DOT.

Sorry to hear of your issues

Unfortunately flight cancellations are high and there is essentially no spare capacity
Yesterday UA cancelled 3% of its systemwide flights, 6% out of EWR (AA was also 3% systemwide and DL 7%)

Most UA TATL aircraft have PremPlus but not all, so with aircraft changes it may or may not be available
In recover from reduced operations from prior two years, UA has hired a large number of new employees and their training / knowledge levels leave much to desire

Do you have a replacement reservation? If you provide some details, those here can look up more information on the availability of PremPlus.

Thank you both. Yes, it's more the abject failure of the telephone agents to tell the truth, or their supervisors to make any meaningful changes that rankles.

We booked the flights in Feb having no idea how insane the situation would be around now. We've flown to UK in times past in late June and it's been fine. But of course everything is different now.

We are absolutely stuck for the flight this evening, they maintain there are no PP seats left (but there are PP seats! Why I'm not on them when he promised I was, no one knows). The flight home they say there are PP seats but not together, and not in our fare price group. The first is an issue because it's my children we're flying with, the second I don't care about at all.

The people we speak to on the phone seem entirely unmoved that you work all year to afford these "luxuries" and then they renege on them with no consequence. It makes the customer service we used to get from BA (lacklustre at best) seem warm and fuzzy, lol.

We will see what happens this evening. I note yesterday's flights were up to 5 hours delayed, haha.

Thanks.

(And I should add - the ground staff at the gate were just superb. One lady was making announcements and the passengers would boo or shout back at her, then the pilot would saunter out and make an announcement and they'd all clap him. I went up to her and told her I saw the injustice, and she got tearful. It must be a endless carousel of misery to do that job at EWR right now.)

At the moment, there are a total of three P+ seats available from EWR to LHR today; two on the 6 PM departure and one on the 8 PM departure. This situation may be fluid throughout the day, particularly if it's another day of tough operations at EWR.

Although this is tough advice at Newark in particular, all else being equal, you'll get better service from someone at the airport than on the phone. At a minimum, they should be able to add you to the P+ upgrade list. However, seating is going to be a challenge.

I didn't understand this part in your original message. Was there a flight change to the return that invalidated your P+ seats? Or did you try to get UA to give free P+ on the return to make up for missing it on the outbound (which is creative, but not really the way things work).

BTW, I don't know about LHR in particular, but in general, I wouldn't invest an awful lot of time in getting a Premier tag on my bag. I've had my bag come out first, last, and everywhere in between with those tags. I've also had my bag lost despite the tags, so if you thought they might pay more attention to your bag because of the tag -- they don't.

It looks like the 6pm flight will still sell 2 Premium Plus seats (I assume you need more). I'd get to the airport as early as possible. Make sure to get in the PP line, since that's what you paid for. They should tag your bags appropriately. Just ignore the phone people. Airport people will be more knowledgeable and helpful.

When you say that there are "seats available", how do you know?

If you are just looking at the seat map, that's essentially meaningless. There may people with reservations who don't yet have seat assignments. This is particularly common when booking through another airline or a travel agent -- you often have to go to the operating carrier's site to select seats and many people just don't bother. But they still have a ticket and UA has to hold an empty seat for them, to be assigned at check-in or at the gate.

So you might see empty PP seats on the seat map even if PP is sold out. This would explain why several agents have told you that it's full.

Not excusing poor service but given the long string of weather issues and the crew / aircraft capacity issues, this has been a difficulty past month or two for airline phone agents across the industry.
BTW, reports in the BA forum are no better

Travelers endure another weekend of mass flight cancellations across America (yahoo.com)

2 O class seats available for sale on the 6pm flight

All of these circumstances are valid, but I'll add a fifth that's sort of an extension of 2 and 4: the PE cabin has the fewest seats on the aircraft (applies not only on UA but also on all TATL JV carriers), so it often has the fewest available seats to get rebooked into during IRROPS. If available, UA obviously won't rebook into J free of charge, and pax may be reluctant to accept a downgrade to Y, so IRROPS recovery and rebooking in general is the hardest among all three cabins IMO.

We are discovering that during IROPS being in a premium seat is more of a problem than it is a benefit.

Flew PLS-SEA on American in April and with a cancelled flight it was either fly in Economy or wait 4 days. We flew in Economy and received $100 per ticket refund per person (if only First was only $100 more than economy when buying the ticket!!!).
Just last week had a cancelled flight on Thursday with United as a party of 5 on United in First and Polaris SEA-DUB. Choice was either economy departure on Sunday or Polaris on Tuesday. Decided to wait until Tuesday (can do that because I go to Ireland multiple times per year and this time is for a month - but if you were on a 5 or 7 day vacation even the delay until Sunday would be very very hard to accept). Flights are jam packed full - premium cabins included. Because premium cabins are smaller the chances of staying in the same cabin are much lower. Then it becomes a bitter pill to swallow to fly economy, in part because it's hard to downgrade, and in part because you know you won't really be compensated for the downgrade.... All first world problems but annoying all the same....

If you are in plain old economy, the options for rebooking are usually better - although flights are really full right now.....

EWR is a total clown show. All that is missing is the little car.

EWR/LIS 64 scheduled push back yesterday 2035; actual 2 hours later because UA could not put the aircraft on the gate (C98 for a Dreamliner???). Traffic on way out, long, long wait, MX issue so back to Gate 123 after another long wait for traffic-an hour; no one at gate to operate jetway, another 30 minutes. Told to deplane at 2:00a.m; two overwhelmed GA's there with no instructions. Called GS line, no help there-said nothing to be done until flight is CX. They had no info. Pilot comes out about 3:00 and tells everyone CX. GA then tells everyone to go to C90 to rebook; tried to get luggage, was refused. Got home by 5:00am. Joke

Request the actual price difference when you booked. If the airline pushes back, file a DOT complaint and consider a CC chargeback (service not provided). You are due a refund of the fare difference.

EDIT: In fact, file a DOT complaint anyway. It's important that the DOT have a record of the creative way that airlines compute the fare difference. Most airlines do this, and the only way that this will stop is with an enforcement letter, which will only happen if the complaints start rolling in. So I would request the correct refund through a DOT complaint, rather than directly contacting the airline again.

Sounds like us the other night. They actively tried to discourage us from getting our bags, but I refused to go without them. I didn't trust them to reroute them. So we waited two hours for those and finally got home at 4:30AM having been at EWR since 4:15PM.

Our cx was first a water issue, then an ac issue, then crew over flight hours. I felt worse for the families with little children who were just **done** and the elderly folks who were having mobility issues. C90 was a joke, we didn't even go, just sat at the gate until I got through by phone.

I understand these things happen, but when you look around and they are happening at every gate, every night, something is badly wrong. Last night's 9PM didn't leave until around 2:30AM. That's a lot of time sat in an airport.

Yep, I can agree on this. I thought I was doing a smart thing, back in Feb, booking this so we could grab a bit of sleep before our connecting flight and rental car journey on the left side of the road (which I can do, but I can do better with a bit of sleep). But no.

If the guy had leveled with me on the phone and said "I can't get you in anything in PP until _____ but you can take Economy on Monday" I'd have gone with today's plan. But thinking I was getting PP And then finding out in the app was not nice.

I'm going to battle them out for a proper refund of the gap between Economy and PPx4 when (if?!) I get the trip completed. They have a nice taxi bill for us to get home that morning to refund us too.

Yes, we were P+ on the way out only. So I argued that if we paid for 3 flights and 1 was P+, they should still provide 1 that's P+. Going on their site to buy new tickets showed 4 available for the return journey in P+, but they refused. I just don't have it in me to continue.

Hanging over all this is the knowledge that our return journey starts at LHR so that will be a joyous odyssey of queues and aggravation and lost luggage and no AC that works to perfectly compliment our experience so far!

Really sorry to hear about your struggles this trip. But you have coined my new favorite expression of the EWR experience: "endless carousel of misery"


This is soo true.
I was hit by irrops on Thursday morning and 1k desk could find no alternate way to get me from EWR to anywhere close to CVG all day, in any class of service. There is NO capacity to absorb disrupted passengers, and many cancellations. It is bad.
I ended up renting a car and driving 10 hours to get home.

Wow. That's a bad day. A stark reminder that Global Services faces the same fate as the rest of us at EWR...
Hope it didn't mess you up too badly.