United needs to train its contractors!
 

email sent to UAL - BAS staff at BDA suck!!! BTW, our crew was awesome and told me to please email UAL

The purpose of this email is to inform United Air Lines of the bad service provided by its contracting ground services agent, BAS at the Bermuda Airport and to bring this to United’s attention so that United may correct these issues.

We flew on United flight 1078 from BDA to ORD on July 8, 2007. At the Bermuda airport, it appears that United does not maintain any employees but uses BAS for check-in services and other ground handling services.

First of all, the BAS employee checking us in could not find our reservations. In all, it took her over 20 minutes to check us in. As premiers (my wife MS. ORDOGG travelled with me), we selected [E+ seats] online when we made our reservation. We asked if our upgrades had cleared and the employee stated no. We proceeded to check in and the employee stared at the same screen for 10 minutes doing nothing. She then stated that only one upgrade cleared. We told her that we wished to remain in our original seats. She stated that our original seats had been given away.

We asked for 2 seats together in economy plus – the agent said there were no more seats in economy plus and seated us in regular economy way in the back. He further stated that we never had [Eplus seats] to begin with!

We proceeded through security and at the gate I asked to be reseated in our original seats. The BAS agent said that he could not make any changes at the gate.

I persisted and the agent manually marked our boarding passes [original Eplus seats]. Also, the BAS employees boarded First Class and then a free for all ensued, contrary to United procedure. We boarded the aircraft and lo and behold board aircraft almost half of economy plus was empty (all empty middles, at least).

The flight was further delayed by the inept handling of the BAS agents.

Onboard, I spoke with one of the crew and she stated that the BAS contractors always made the flight late and did not know what they were doing. As an aside, our inflight crew was outstanding) I'm surprised United tolerates this from its contractors.
If UA is going to use contractors at
stations which I understand since BDA is served seasonally – please ensure that they are trained, and if not replace them with competent staff!

You are not the first to complain about the contracted employees at BDA, but I can't find the other thread(s) right now.

Similar complaints have been made about MBJ as well.

They can’t get their own trained in IAD and you expect them to train a foreign contractor.

I recall reading about poor service in SXM - i.e. someone was denied checkin 60 minutes before departure, being told "their seats were given away" - I guess they finally were allowed to checkin, and found there were only about 20 people on board the flight.

Interestingly enough, the FA's said BA used to handle UA at BDA and the service was supposedly flawless. I cringe at the thought of flying UA to Liberia Costa Rica (LIR) this winter!