kaarija

Does anyone know what's going on with the delay? My family member is stuck on this flight and they are claiming it's because a passenger is refusing to downgrade from polaris to PE? I am confused as to how this can happen.

cfischer

Downgrades happen. What is surprising is the fact that UA doesn’t ask for volunteers given the many direct and indirect flights on this route. I am sure $1000 and it is a done deal to take a later flight, maybe even $500

vicontt

There are not that many direct flights on this route, and UA has only 2. UA949 is the second one, so any rebooking would be for Monday - which would take a ton of diff for business and leisure travellers alike, so not surprised about the lack of volunteers.

Lux Flyer

They were asking for volunteers. They had to get 4 of them. Not an easy task especially when you’ve boarded the plane already and people are settled in.

JimInOhio

What would cause them to need four volunteers for downgrading? It doesn't appear to be an a/c swap.

drewguy

Shows a third flight (939) that left at 2pm BST. Though it shows booked full as well (1 upgrade). But no other viable connections to SFO, so anyone displaced was staying in London or some other US hub (later flights to IAD and EWR do exist).

Anyway - wild guess that they'd run upgrade list and then some paid GS either missed connection or otherwise so they sought to accommodate.

greendx

I was on a EWR-LHR flight once during the summer with a heavy storm causing all kinds of issues with misconnects in EWR that day. My flight was on a 757, I boarded and was sitting in the last row of business class when a GA boarded the plane and began going row to row front to back asking for a volunteer to downgrade to Y. Everyone said no. When she got to me, I really didn't want to move down to Y but was offered $2000 so I accepted. Moved to an exit row aisle seat and was promised a business class meal. About a half an hour later while still at the gate same GA boarded the plane again and told me that they no longer needed my seat up front and that I could move back up. My vouchers were 2x $1000 (if I remember correctly they couldn't assign more than $1000 per). GA asked for them back. I handed them back, she held them in her hands and thought about for a few seconds and handed one of them back to me, letting me keep it, thanking me again for volunteering my seat.

JimInOhio

The last flight to ORD doesn't (didn't) go until 3:20 PM but it looks like it went out full anyway. Two connections to SFO from there.

Lux Flyer

III.DD.5 of the AFA contract

cfischer

o.k., that's harder ... However, money can almost always fix that. How much were they offering? Did they have inop seats?

VRFast

Looks like this flight (949) went out 47/50 in Polaris and 23/24 in PP, so perhaps that is true. Although only shows 1 unoccupied seat in Polaris.

cfischer

4 seats blocked in row 11&12

Steve M

In the absence of an aircraft swap or broken seats, what would cause that situation to come up suddenly, such that they needed to ask for volunteers in order to accommodate that obligation because they were now overbooked? LHR-SFO is always well over 8 hours, so it's not as if it's normally a hair under and then due to weather predicted at the last minute to take longer than 8 hours and thus trigger the requirement at the last minute.

runner450

today’s issue is a deferral in the crew rest area that arose after boarding

JimInOhio

deferral: a postponement of an action or event

What does that have to do with a crew rest area?