Saturday, June 13, 2009

Damnation to United.


I traveled to Atlanta and Alabama this week. For some reason flights out of Reagan seemed more expensive than usual, so I had to take one out of Dulles. Specifically, a United Flight, which I rarely use. I was to leave on Monday at 1230, but my was flight canceled and I was re-booked on a 2150 flight. I found it odd that there were not ANY flights out of Dulles to Atlanta until then, but whatever.

That later flight didn't board until 2230, I came stumbling into my hotel room at 0130 for a early morning site visit. I was pissed off, but these things happen.

Fast forward to Friday, my flight out of Alabama gets canceled. There was no announcement over the intercom, or a United rep at the gate. How did I(and others) find out? With an email notification. Then I was informed I had been rebooked for a 1800 the next day. After going to to the ticketing counter(because I guess United can't afford to have any personnel behind the security checkpoint) I ended up waiting in line for a good 50 minutes while the one person there handled the 60 or so people. I go ahead and called the United customer service number, and I get some asshole overseas who is not in the mood to search for a flight that would get me to DC quicker. In fact, he flat out said "no, sorry, can't help you."

The poor guy at the ticketing counter, judging from his uniform, is actually some kind of baggage handler rather than customer service rep. He manages to get everyone a flight that would get people to their final destination quicker than the automatic computer booking service did. Kudos to him.

Goddamnit but I hate United. Whenever I have these long-ass delays, it always seems to be United.

2 comments:

Ashley said...

Yeah United isn't scoring any points with me lately either. On my flight to Hawaii, we had a 45 minute delay. Then a week later on my return flight home from Hawaii, we had 3 separate maintenance delays (AFTER all passengers had already boarded the plane, mind you) + finally a complete change of airplane + another delay due to the need to find a new flight attendant crew cuz apparently our original flight crew was now offshift!

Ashley said...

Thought you might find this article interesting. It sure explains a lot of the awful service you and I endured this summer while traveling with United! http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/24/united-airlines-lessons-leadership-managing-mistakes.html