recent flight in economy, terrible seats, trouble with snacks/preorders
 

first UA flight in a year, red eye on 738. Seat pitch and recline were abysmal and seat was hard as a rock. Fairly brutal overnight. Par for the course? Definitely worse than AS.

Had trouble with snacks. Received email about preordering. Attempted to do so, could not complete transaction. was able to enter and save credit card info associated with Confirmation code. In air they said I needed UA app and could find no evidence of me having saved cc. Don't take cc on board. Thus, no snacks. Kids not happy. Dumb system, too gimmicky and too unreliable.

I chose UA for my Amex airline in 2022 because of this planned flight, unable to spend any money on snacks (much less hundreds of dollars) so looks like I'll be buying TravelBank funds for a future flight. So would like to resolve these problems before that day arrives.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Did you make a MileagePlus account and save your credit card info there? At any rate, if you are on UA flights, I would highly recommend the UA app; it is very useful.

Your experience was bad, but if it’s any consolation, it’s a bit of an outlier. United has become very good (and is getting better by the day) at extracting money from customers. If you follow the advice given, it should work next time.

It is an "outlier" if you are not a regular UA pax. I am and pretty much know how to navigate the system after literally decades of flying with them. I have the app and have CC info loaded in to it (for better or worse). But I have heard multiple similar stories from friends and family that are not regular UA users, don't fly with them to have the app, or just don't want to deal with it for the occasional UA flight they take. Last year I had friends fly out to KOA on the DEN flight to visit me, not a short flight and they ran into the same issue, no food no beverage, I think they eventually threw a bag of pretzels at them. I can see not taking cash any more but not accepting a card in the air I personally believe was a bad but perhaps an unfortunately necessary move. I would add that my pre orders still get routinely screwed up and again this is from a somewhat knowledgeable UA pax.

UA is worse than AS for what you mention. it's not a very customer friendly airline if you are not GS/1K. They just don't care unless you sign the contracts for the big bucks. You'll need the app for everything and the FA's let you know. and no, pre-orders rarely work nor are they likely available (it's mostly a marketing gimmick). .

I can confirm that there are troubles with the system. I was recently downgraded to Y during IRROPS and took my usual aft exit row aisle seat. During the flight, I heard a woman in the row behind me try to order some food and a drink. The FA said that there was no payment method saved in the system, even though the woman insisted that she had bought something on the outbound flight. There was gnashing of teeth as she was getting frustrated with the FA, who was saying that there was no way he could sell her anything on the long (4 hour) flight. I turned to the FA and said, "Give her my drink and food item, I am a 1K". He looked confused for a second, but then said OK. Problem solved. Lucky for her, I always take my own food and beverage onboard.

In these days of "tap-to-pay", etc., it seems ridiculous not to have a back-up onboard payment system.

thanks for the info, good to know I was not just being dense. Not sure I understand not taking cc at POS, all other airlines do that and it seems to work well - talk about a captive audience! In our case led to lost sales so sort of a head scratcher.

At any rate I'll get the app for my next flight and hope the cc info successfully stores.

There are multiple announcements in the gate area before boarding to get the app etc etc. so whether a long time FF or a newbie there really is no excuse.
having said that the fact they can’t take cards in flight is a bit much in todays age.

as a paying customer, being required to install a company's bloatware on my personal device to extract further service for which i've already paid is insult to injury. That is one excuse. Remove the bloatware elements, provide for free download inflight, and it would be better.

having already followed their emailed instructions at home to add a cc to my reservation, whatever announcements i heard at the gate it didn't register that I needed to start an entirely new process (download the app, create a MP account, add a cc?) and that what I'd already done was insufficient and useless.

not sure how an app provided by ANY airline for the purpose of obtaining BPs, seeing flight status, and making inflight life easier is bloatware.

At first glance, sure.

But to defend UA Management (which I rarely do these days...) they do have a bit of a but to crack for a backup system. Do you:
- issue 25,000 credit card readers to FAs? That's a heckuva cost for the occasional pax who wasn't able to make things work, AND you have to hope the FAs thought to bring it into the aisle and not stashed away in their luggage.
- Put one card reader on each plane? Those who have flown UA long enough can probably tell you the horror stories of the HID times. No one knows it's broken until midflight, and not every location has sufficient time/hardware/manpower to switch out. One broken reader causes problems for multiple segments.

Coming from a person who has to detail the steps multiple times a day (in other words, I'm no fan of it myself...), there really isn't a great solution.

One can always ask the FA during boarding to check if the saved CC is on file, and have time to download app/input CC info if not. Also, I'm not 100% certain, but I believe there's a way to add CC info to a reservation in flight, sans app via the website?

when it makes calls to at least 4 third party url's when using the app, that is the very definition of bloatware.

you really think UA isn't able to have a terminal or inflight device capable of connecting via it's wifi? if people's app's can do it, the airline could do it. or is their wi-fi really that bad :o

ultimately is it really the end of the world if you can’t buy the crappy food onboard?

End of the world? No. But that's not what the OP is complaining about. The complaints are about the systems that UA has in place to supposedly enable someone who's purchased a ticket in economy to pre-order items, store credit card info as well as the uncomfort of the seats.

David