United Airlines could be a lot better.

Gah.
After lacking the fuel to circle the bad weather at Denver for any amount of time, my flight from Texas diverted to pick up fuel then return, by which point my connecting flight had long since departed.

Now, laying over in a very-slightly discounted hotel with nothing but yesterday’s clothes and a standby ticket for the next day and all that is probably standard to business flyers, but some things suck more than they have to.
[ul]
[li]The line for the single open “service” counter was 50 people long, and took over an hour to get through. Having only enough people to manage things when nothing is going wrong is insane for an airline[/li][li]It would have been nice of them to upgrade me a class for the inconvenience[/li][li]Despite being printed out 10 minutes beforehand, my ticket out of Texas indicated the wrong gate, as did one of the two sets of overhead monitors. I know some people barely made the flight because of that.[/li][li]I’m going to try to get a picture of it, but United has this ‘Red Carpet’ class program that totally rules. They’ve made a ‘Y’ shape out of those retractable-belt/poles, so you enter the plane through one of two entrances that are perhaps 5’ long. On one of them, there’s the regular floor. But on the other (get this), there’s this red welcome mat! Huh? Isn’t that great? I wish I could walk on it. :rolleyes: [/li][li]There’s no place for me to even plug my laptop in anywhere. Full marks to QWest, the fully connected workspace of which I’m using for free right now.[/li][/ul]

Oh yeah, and today is Thanksgiving, so it looks like I’ll be spending it at the Coffee Beanery instead of with my parents. :frowning:

[Typical Doper] Sounds like you fucked up by not preparing and now you’re hearing bitching about it. <shrug> [/Typical Doper]

Dudders, I know you’re trying hard for the Dumbest Poster title, but you’re too stupid to win it.

While he’s trying to figure that out, that situation blows, Nanoda. A severe lack of planning on United’s part, but they’re not the ones who have to deal with the repercussions so much.

Why, because I messed up a word? Oooh, shoot me.

If that’s not why, you’ve been whooshed, big guy.

Huh? How is the OP “not prepared”? There’s only so much you can do to prepare for the vagaries of the airlines, even those within the airline’s control (such as the lack of staff at the service counter). The business of not having enough fuel to circle for a bit may be due to poor preparation on the part of the airline, also, though I’m not qualified to judge that.

That said: every truly shitty flight experience I’ve ever had has been at the hands of United.

There was the flight back from Hawaii, where I had to change planes in San Francisco. Got to the airport, the flight was listed as 2+ hours late. This meant I had roughly 20 minutes to get from one end of the SF airport to the other. With a sprained ankle. Sure there are little trucks, as I’d seen on the way outbound, unfortunately I saw precisely one of those little trucks that time, it was full, and I was able to limp to the other end faster. I will admit, United put me on another airline’s flight which got me in early enough to crawl to my connecting flight.

The nonstop from Dulles to San Francisco a year or so later, after a crazy day at the office, where I had no time to get lunch. And the lift from the food prep area to the passenger area broke, so there was no food on the plane. But that was OK, they gave us free movie headphones and free drinks and woohoo, a 25 dollar travel voucher which I never used. 's OK though though, I’m pretty sure the person next to me didn’t mind my gnawing his arm off.

Then the flight from New York to Dulles, which was bouncier than any amusement park ride I’ve ever ridden and quite literally had me crying in terror. OK, I really can’t blame United for that, since in theory they don’t control the weather.

Then the flight from Dulles to Denver. I arrived at the airport first, of the three people in my group. I asked for a window or aisle seat. The checkin person proudly announced that I could also have a bulkhead seat. What the bitch did NOT tell me was that bulkhead seat happened to be in the MIDDLE OF FIVE SEATS. When I found that out upon boarding, every other seat was taken. A colleague - who a) got to the airport last of the three, and b) paid less for his ticket, got upgraded to Business class.

Needless to say, I do not fly United. I’ll pay more to go on another airline.

You keep trying and trying. No, it’s not because of the typo, dope, though I laughed when I saw that still there after the edit.

Yeah, Dopers can be cold, but usually they have a better reason than the lameass joke you tried to play off. At no point were Nanoda’s troubles caused by a lack of planning on her part, and that ain’t hard to see.

Right. :rolleyes:

So United should plan for random thunderstorms in October that happen to park themselves right over the airport? This is airline travel - 95% of the time it is great, and 5% of the time it sucks eggs. I’d like to see how United would fit all 100 passengers who missed their connections into the four First Class seats at the front of the plane.

The next time I need to drive across Wyoming and there is a blizzard, I’m going to work up a serious bitch about Toyota and why they can’t build a car that can get me to Mom’s house in a whiteout.

I loathe United. They routinely cancel their last flights into my city, which means they routinely cancel the first flights out. I find their staff generally unhelpful and disinterested. Give me Alaska/Horizon any day.

My sympathies to Nanoda. I’m not sure what DudleyGarrett is criticizing about her actions. The experience mirrors my own troubles with Delta last summer, and I can’t see what planning ahead we could have done to have avoided the problems.

My family was flying to Rio de Janeiro with a 3h layover in Atlanta.
Our flight from Newark to Atlanta was supposed to leave at 1:35pm. They called us in the morning to warn that the flight was delayed because of weather, but to come in anyway on time. We did.

They finally got us off the ground at around 7pm. At that point, the captain told us “If we don’t leave within 10 minutes the crew will be required to rest. We’re making a run for it” – and we did, passing a dozen stopped planes to get to the head of the line and take off with seconds to spare.

We arrived at the gate at 9:40pm. The Rio flight had left at 9:04pm.

No one from Delta cared.
They didn’t guide us to the customer service area – all I could do was look for the longest line and assume that was it.

After waiting in line for 2 hours, a Delta employee passed by and laughed as she said “Voucher? If it was weather related, they won’t give you anything. Better try to get a hotel now, 'cause they are all booked.”
At that point I gave up and called up Marriott and got two rooms in downtown Atlanta.

We were now placed on standby. Due to their problems, even though we had a huge cushion of time, we had to appear at the airport each night, hoping five people wouldn’t show up for the single flight to Rio that day.

We lucked out and were given seats on the next evening’s flight.

The rest of the trip had plenty of adventure (Brazilian air traffic control shut down forcing us to stop in Puerto Rico briefly), but the treatment we received in Atlanta was absurd and uncalled for.

Exhibit A, your honor.

It’s all about how they handle the problem. No, I wouldn’t expect them to give first-class seats to everyone for their troubles, but they should have the whole hotel thing totally ironed out and ready to go. They know well beforehand who will miss connections, so they could get the necessary paperwork/vouchers ready before the plane lands. They could then treat the passengers with dignity and respect as they apologize and instruct them how to get to their hotel.

Laughing at a line of fifty angry passengers just doesn’t cut it.

Even if the policy is “no vouchers for weather” they could be much more decent and understanding.

Underscoring this is the fact that after waiting forever in a long-ass line, we called up Delta’s customer service line and were told that we were already ticketed for the next flight, automatically. As it turned out, after two hours, a person came up and changed the paper in a little machine near where we had been waiting, we scanned our boarding passes, and we got new boarding passes for the next day.

The booking had been done automatically by Delta’s computers before we even landed! No one had told us. The machine had been out of paper for two hours.

It’s all about the way they treat people.

The thing is, they used to, before deregulation. I was flying with my college roommate to Corpus Christi from Boston. We got delayed, and missed the Houston to Corpus Christi flight. The airline gave us a hotel voucher and a $25 dinner voucher - a lot in 1970. Nowadays all the people would have time to prepare for problems have been laid off, and making passengers suffer improves the bottom line. The fact that the airlines are still opposing the passenger bill of rights - after saying they’d deal with it last time and lying, shows that. United actually used to be my favorite, and I piled up tons of miles on them. Now, not so much.

One nasty thing they do - my company has a deal with them, and when I fly with them I can actually get decent seats. When I fly on the government nickel, I get forced to use them but I seem to wind up in a middle seat, no matter how far ahead I book.
But I hate Delta more. Hint - keep the airline numbers in your cell phone, and call to rebook if you’re standing in line. Plus, call for a hotel while standing in line. And get a confirmation number.

Actually, through a combination of tremendous good luck and planning (that is, spending $$$ for direct flights whenever possible, always booking 3-hour layovers, etc.) in something like 1100+ flights I’ve only had to stay over once.

And that time sucked. You have my sympathy.

Please remember to “pay it forward”, and never use United again unless there is a significant cost or convenience advantage. Although it seems like a pipe-dream, I am convinced that if people did actively punish the worst airlines by not flying on them even if they are slightly cheaper, then things would change. I may be totally off-base on that, but I don’t see any other hope other than brutal, totalitarian re-regulation. Which might just be called for…

Out of curiosity, what in the OP do you see to be the fault of United, and requires them to be punished? I have no connection to United and don’t care to defend them, it’s just that my experience is just the opposite. I’ve flown over 500,000 miles with them and don’t have any complaints, other than the summer of hell they inflicted on us about 10 years ago when they were having labor issues. I switcher to Frontier for a while but came back once things were resolved.

And this thread neatly demonstrates the problem.

There’s no incentive for United to give any more of a shit because enough of their paying customers don’t get hit by the problems, or don’t care.

Of course it’s not United’s fault that there was bad weather but when you look at the list of complaints in the OP it’s clear they could have handled it better. Perhaps made a bad situation a little more bearable somehow.

But as long as people continue to go “Meh, don’t affect me” then it it’ll never make enough of an impact of their bottom line for them to care.

Sorry your travel has been so sucky Nanoda, hopefully things’ll look up from now on. You should write a letter letting them know what you thing they could have done better, be calm and clear, if no one tells 'em then they never find out …

SD

Hey Dudley, I got the joke. It amused me.

Thank you…! (I also didn’t expect to get an exhibit so early!)

raises hand

I fly Continental every time unless they either simply don’t go where I’m going, or are at least 20% more expensive. I will continue to do so until they start screwing me over. I fly somewhat often (10-15 times a year) and they have yet to do so.

Well, I’m actually a guy; now I’m going to be thinking about my username for the rest of the day… thanks for helping out there. sniff :frowning: :wink:

Anyhow, Lamar Mundane gets to be first douchebag, 'cause DudleyGarrett doesn’t count. :stuck_out_tongue:
Read my list again for comprehension; I don’t think it’s unreasonable for United to think “Hey, we just delayed a bunch of flights, and now dozens of connections are blown. Lets, I don’t know, have some staff ready to deal with things when the flights actually arrive.

And while I specifically excluded the consequences of being involuntarily layed-over w/o my baggage, like the guy next to me on the airplane said, this is the 21st century: we have the technology to forecast weather more than 2 hrs in advance and plan for a few minutes of circling time.

Also, I found out that United does have a place for laptops like this, but I have to sign up for their Red Carpet club, of which I echew out of principal, if not lack of $$$.

Oh yeah, and in case you didn’t know, apparently the 'States are on Defcon Orange, whatever that means. As far as I can tell, it involves repeating this fact every 10 minutes on the intercom.