Yeah, my intent wasn’t to undermine you and your plight. I despise air travel big time, especially after 9/11. I feel your pain.
Hey, if I got wooshed, I’ll cop to it. I just don’t think you said what you thought you said.
Uh, what? Please don’t continue to be a fucking idiot.
First, United did not delay the flights, the weather did. Second, no you can’t forecast what the weather is going to be like on a patch of ground thirty miles from 14,000 foot mountains 30 miles away two hours in advance. You can land at DIA in rain or snow, but not when there is lightning and 60 MPH wind gusts.
I get it, you’re frustrated and angry - I would be too - but it’s not anyone’s fault. Shit happens. Those lines at the service counter would move a hell of a lot faster if people would just state their problem and let the clerk resolve it, but instead they feel the need to explain exactly why they are personally put out and how it isn’t fair because this is their first vacation in 9 months and I DON"T WANT to spend the night in a hotel and WHY CAN’T you just get another plane and fly to Rio De Janeiro tonight? As someone mentioned upstream, you could resolve your issues with a five minute phone call instead of waiting in line.
P.S. There are power outlets in all the United gates at DIA - they’re in the round pillars.
Fine. Ya got me. Clearly I totally misconstrued your blindingly obvious and oh-so-witty joke. Can you explain just what you were getting at, if not making a stab at unsympathetic Dopers and in the process being an idiot about it?
DudleyGarrett No worries 
Lamar Mundane I never said it was their fault for the weather, I said it was their fault for not knowing about and taking appropriate measures for the weather. And I think they can do better than you think they can.
I didn’t see any of the passengers in front of me bitching or complaining. The one guy who did was a 1/2 hour behind me in line and merely asked them loudly if they could put more staff on, which was something we were all thinking.
And even if every passenger felt the need to express their dissatisfaction in the form of a 1/2 hour sonnet with chorus and stage lighting, I’d count it under “cost of doing business” and still not excuse the lack of service.
Also, for your information, it turns out my cell phone does not work on American networks, and a scant few of the pillars here have a single dual outlet on them (I asked, and looked).
And QWest still rocks, since I’m sitting here playing the Warcraft III that some forward-thinking individual back at the office installed. Try the tower defence.
Lamar, sounds like you have been on the other side of the counter, perhaps?
Since you mentioned my Rio flight, I must make it clear that I acted nothing other than civil. I know full well how many flights to Rio there are. I know full well that being rude to someone who already has dealt with hundreds of rude people is uncalled for, and would guarantee me not getting on the next five flights.
My beef is this: I paid for a service and they were unable to provide it for reasons out of their control, but that does not give them license to wash their hands of the issue and say “Too bad, so sad.”
In the process of resolving the problem, I spoke respectfully with everyone I met. They do not return the favor. That’s it.
Now the folks at the Residence Inn in downtown Atlanta, they were kind to us. Even though we couldn’t stay in the rooms past 1pm, they let us lounge around all day and did their best to ease our plight, helping us get around the city and such. They didn’t go out of their way, but they were simply decent folks treating others as they would like to be treated.
No, it’s just that I’ve been a frequent traveller for a while now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of problems come not from the airlines or their employees, but from the passengers. People seem to turn into raging assholes once they walk into an airport. They bitch because they can’t bring their 8" “pocket” knife on the plane, they bitch about the lines, they bitch about having to take their shoes off… Then they finally get to the concourse and find they have an hour to kill, so they decide the best thing to do is to drink as much as possible - you ever notice how packed the bars always are at any hour of the day?
If I ever found myself on the other side of the counter, it would be a short ammount of time before I found myself behind bars.
Oh, I reflecting on my experiences as well when I said what I said. My experiences have been very poor with United, including them canceling flights due to “no flight attendants” and costing me a thousand for a ticket and travel costs.
I don’t fly them very often now. If at all; I’d have to check.
If everybody took up arms, so to speak, against airlines that they feel have handled things poorly every airline would be boycotted. Not even Southwest gets it right all the time.
Since they all have issues from time to time, no amount of action will cause any changes because the major difference between the airlines anymore is the name. The planes are more or less the same, the amenities are more or less the same, the prices are more or less the same, the marginal increase in quality to distinguish yourself over your competitors would eat whatever profits could be made from doing it.
Frequent fliers know that during irregular operations, the first thing you do is call reservations on your cell phone while you’re waiting in line. You’ll almost always get through on the phone before you get to the front of the line.
[QUOTE=Nanoda]
[li]It would have been nice of them to upgrade me a class for the inconvenience[/li][/QUOTE]
As has been said, there’s no way they had enough first or business class seats to accomodate everyone inconvenienced.
Every legacy airline allows first class fliers and those with high elite status (that is, those who travel a lot during a calendar year, typically at least 25,000 miles) to board before anyone else. If you are in that class, you know that legacies, including United, try, with varying success, to keep you loyal, since you provide so much of their revenue. Providing a red carpet entrance to bypass the “rifraff” is one recent way they’ve been trying at certain airports.
If you read the message boards created for frequent fliers (e.g. flyertalk.com), they love the red carpet on the United Airlines board. Of course most of the them travel much more than 25,000 miles per year.
Ed
That’s one of those things one learns through a painful experience.
I had no need for a cell phone at the time since we were leaving the US for a month to where my phone wouldn’t work. Thankfully, my sister-in-law wasn’t so short-sighted. Her phone saved the day.
My favorite weather-related bitch happened about 15 years ago. I had to fly from Honolulu to Atlanta, then take a commuter flight to Columbus, GA. Got to Atlanta fine, finally found the gate for my flight to Columbus and settled in to wait. Announcement over the P.A.: my flight has been cancelled due to bad weather in Columbus, they will put us on the next flight (about 2 hours away).
Ok, they can’t control the weather. I call my husband in Columbus to tell him of the change in arrival time. He says “What bad weather? I can see the airport from here and the sky is clear.”
I realize the commuter flight I was scheduled on was only going to be about half full. I can understand that it would be more cost-effective to put the passengers on a later flight and not run a half-full plane. But don’t fucking LIE to me! I nearly missed the funeral I was flying in to attend and you are going to LIE to me? Assholes.
That’s true. But how they react to not getting it right is the kicker.
An old example: when I lived in Louisiana, I was pretty much stuck on the old Texas International airlines. They were pretty much always late (and went from Lafayette to New Orleans by way of Houston. 
One day they were particularly bad, and we were stuck on the plane for a few hours before we finally took off. The pilot came on, at last and said “I could tell you what the problem was, but that won’t make a difference, so I won’t.”
In the old days at least, when there was a problem on United, they would say exactly what it was and their estimate of when it would be fixed. They usually beat it, which made passengers feel they were doing a good job. That kind of attitude doesn’t cost a penny, but probably requires workers who aren’t overstressed.
True, and frankly I’m very glad of cheap airfares (particularly here in Europe) and I know the problems involved and am happy to take the risk.
It just seems like there could be a market for another set of airlines that charge a bit more for a little extra service.
As you say, airlines are mostly all the same it’s only a matter of time until some decide to try and distingish themselves on a point other than price.
I’m convinced that something similar happened to me years ago. I was flying on the now-defunct Canadian Airlines from London (UK) to Vancouver, via Toronto.
Upon arrival in Toronto, we were told our plane was delayed by an hour. Then it turned into three hours, then five, and finally it was cancelled altogether. We were put on the next scheduled Vancouver flight, which left late at night, about 8 hours after we arrived in Toronto.
The plane was well under half full, even though it had all of its original passengers, plus the people who had been scheduled to go on the earlier flight. I remain convinced that the airline simply decided that it didn’t want to fly two almost-empty planes out to the west coast.
For me, this is the big thing. Sure, i understand that shit happens. But on so many occasions, the airlines make no attempt whatsoever to keep passengers informed about what’s going on.
On a Southwest flight from Baltimore a couple of years ago, the indicator boards said that our flight would be leaving on time. Now, as anyone who’s flown Southwest knows, they have short turnaround times for the flights, so i thought nothing of it when i arrived at the gate and there was no plane there. Southwest generally do a good job of getting the plane unloaded and then reloaded ready for takeoff in a pretty short amount of time.
But when there was only 20 minutes to go before our scheduled departure, and there was still no plane, i knew we were going to be leaving late. The plane ended up arriving (from Florida, i think) about an hour after we were due to leave, and we ended up taking off almost two hours late.
Not once in that time was there any announcement warning that there would be a delay, or saying how long the delay might be. And it’s not like they didn’t know where the plane was. It was flying in from Florida. They know what time it took off and, barring sudden weather changes, once a plane’s in the air they know almost exactly how long it will take to arrive.
All they needed to do was make an announcement, early in the process, saying “Ladies and Gentlemen, unfortunately the plane for this flight has been delayed leaving Orlando, and will be arriving 90 minutes late. We will do our best to get you on the plane and in the air as soon as possible after it arrives. Sorry for the inconvenience” But there was nothing, and people got frustrated. In the long run, the lack of announcements also made life more unpleasant for the staff, because people kept going to the counter wanting to know what the hell was going on.
Maybe the weather problem was in the city that the plane was coming from?
Seriously, do you really think that a major airline with incredibly tight schedules just cancels flights because they haven’t sold enough tickets? What about the next leg for that plane - from Columbus to wherever? And the leg after that? All of those flights get cancelled as well because they haven’t sold enough seats on the one leg. This is a perfect example of passengers thinking a delay is a personal affront to them rather than an act of nature.
I wonder about this. Most airline’s airframe schedules seem to be very strange. Except for a few small airports that really only connect to one major airport, it doesn’t seem all that common that a plane lands in one place and then goes back to where it came from–a plane from Toronto to Vancouver might next go to Calgary and then run the red-eye to Montreal before finally hopping back to Toronto a day later to start the cycle all over again.
Unless they were planning on also canceling the hypothetical Calgary and Montreal flights, they’d have to do a lot of airplane shuffling to get the schedule to work out properly, because suddenly, they have an extra plane sitting on the ground in Toronto, where it’s not needed.
Perhaps you missed this from SnakesCatLady’s post when you were reading it?
The passengers were told that that the reason for the cancellation was “bad weather in Columbus”, not “the plane you’re supposed to be taking is stuck in another city”, which a perfectly legitimate reason for delaying/cancelling a flight. In fact, it’s happened to me several times, and I’ve never held the airline responsible for it. But in this case, the airline obviously lied about the weather conditions at the destination airport. Why would they do that, instead of giving the real reason? Do they think people wouldn’t be able to find out that there was no bad weather in Columbus, or do they think people would find that a more acceptable excuse than the truth, whatever it may have been?
When I lived in New Jersey, United had a few flights that left from Trenton, which was incredibly convenient for me. Close by, and free parking. The problem was that quite frequently return flights would get canceled because “the landing lights were out.” Right. When we did fly, there were only a few people on the plane - we even got redistributed on a 737 once. A friend who flew frequently chose to drive 50 miles to Philadelphia because there was such a big chance of getting bused to Trenton. So it can happen.