So last month I book tickets to Italy for end of January for Mrs Blather and me using frequent flier miles. There is a trade show in Florence that Mrs B wants to check out for her yarn store. Later we decide that since I am out of work it’s probably better that I stay home and look for work and have one of Mrs B’s employees go in my stead.
I call up United to get the tickets switched. After I get through 6 levels of annoying automated phone prompts I get though to an agent. They tell me I have to cancel my ticket, and pay $100 fee to put the miles back in my account. Then they will book a new ticket for the employee. OK, that makes sense so far. BUT, before I do this they discover that we can’t get the employee the same flights I had. They have to change 4 times!! But, I ask, if I give up my flight doesn’t that make it available? No, it goes back in the pool for people in the waiting list. Then it gets worse. If I just cancel my ticket then there is no guarantee that Mrs B can get the same flights herself. She’ll have to take the same fucked up 4 layover abortion of a routing they offer for the new ticket and we’ll need to pay $100 to change her ticket. Can’t we just switch the name on the ticket? Oh, no, Lufthansa (which has one of the legs) and United’s computers don’t talk to each other. I elevate this to a supervisor and I get the same answer. They won’t even wave the change fees.
Mrs B refuses to change planes 4 times for a one week business trip. Meanwhile we had already told the 60 year-old employee that she’d be going in my place. She was all excited since she is Italian and had never been to Italy before. Now we get to crush her. Of course we could buy her a ticket, but yarn stores don’t make enough money to pay $1,000 for business travel.
Fuck United, fuck automated phone systems, fuck computers, and fuck frequent flyer programs. And I know god damned well that the flights will have empty seats on them. Christ, if you can’t use miles to fly to Europe in the dead of winter, when can you use them?
Ooh, email me, too, DanBlather. Not that I’m fishing for a discount, but next time I’m in Portland visiting the in-laws, it would be fun to check out a new (to me) yarn store!
I’ve never had any problems flying United, but as I’ve said before, they’ve got an automated service for their frequent flyers to send automated alerts to their phones, emails, etc.
Which is a good idea, except when someone has decided to send their automated alerts to my cell phone. For sixteen months, I’ve tried off and on to get United to cease sending someone else’s alerts to my phone, with no luck yet.
I booked revenue tickes for my wife and her employee and will have to cancel my FF tickets. It’ll cost me $200 to return the miles to my account, but since they fucked me over I’ll wait until the last fucking minute so those seats can remain unsold.
Thanks, my wife deserves the credit though. She even contributes to health insurance. This became really important when one of the women had a difficult birth and would have been out $1,000s of dollars if it weren’t for the insurance. The people who work for her are great however, and deserve it.
I can’t help but think that one of the reasons airlines are perpetually going out of business is that they must burn five times as much money on admin, wastage and confusion as they need to. Even leaving aside security issues, they’re administratively the most bunged-up organizations I’ve ever seen, all of them using ancient CRM terminals plugged into what are evidently the worst IT systems in the world. They place innumerable obstacles in front of the customer to allegedly optimize seat usage and yet every week I take at least one flight where there’s 27 people on a 140-seat flight. It’s no wonder airlines that keep it simple, like Southwest and WestJet, are eating their lunch.
One of the more amusing parts of any business trip is checking in. I buy my tickets electronically, check in and get my boarding pass myself at the kiosk, go to hand in my bag, and the person at the counter spends fifteen minutes typing. What could they possibly be typing? They have my name, my information, my itinerary, my passport info, and at that point even my seat’s assigned. There’s no possible excuse for it.
DanBlather’s story is typical. Any fool could design a Web-based system that would allow you to take the same seat and transfer it to another person, but they’re using AS/400 systems designed in the Bronze Age by people who have never actually worked at the counter.
I am curious why your strong dislike for MU. Is it the overblown hype? My addiction to watching soccer only started a couple of years ago (thanks Fox Soccer Channel) and as I am sure you know, soccer is the bastard step-son of sports in the US, so I don’t get to hear much about the teams.
I have such a thing for Ronaldo and Rooney. Although if Rooney doesn’t pull his head out of his ass this season I may have to kick him to the curb.
