Even for evil airline stories, this one may shock you. How about:
- Holding $5,000 in tickets from a family for six months, then telling them the day before that the flight has been canceled;
- When confronted with the fact that the flight hasn’t been canceled, telling the family that the reservation has been lost;
- Finally admitting that they’ve bumped the family from the flight and were lying about the cancelation and the lost reservation;
- Offering replacement seats on multiple planes and days, splitting the family up on different flights and depositing them at different islands;
- Offering to get them there 5 days into a 7 day vacation, part of which was scheduled to spend time with a family member who was dying in a hospice in Hawaii;
- Refusing to write a letter on the family’s behalf so that they can collect their insurance payment on the house they rented but never used.
With one act of disregard, United destroyed the vacation, cost the family over $10,000 in house rental fees that they can’t get back, and forced them to cancel the trip. The dying family member they didn’t get to see passed away in early June.
How could United mess up a trip so badly? The mother who arranged all of it, Anita Cabral, suspects it has to do with the bottom line:
Cabral has a theory for this shabby treatment: fuel prices.
Between January and June, as the oil industry mounted its historic shakedown of consumers, the price of those tickets tripled. The folks who paid the most got to fly.
The columnist who wrote about the Cabrals’ problems said he called United directly for a response, and was never called back.
“Bad airline stories are nothing like this” [Sign On San Diego] (Thanks to Randy!)
(Photo: Cubbie_n_Vegas)
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I wonder what the FAA is doing about this… Shouldn’t they get involved somehow ?
@Dave J.: probably because no one would trust them to actually provide that experience…
Although I’ve heard Virgin provides excellent service while being more expensive.
Crikey!
United for the next Golden Poop award. That is just terrible.
@: Only on United and some other US airlines will this be the case. (broken record moment here) International airlines are good for cross-ocean trips- yes, I’d rather fly to Tokyo or Singapore or Bangkok or wherever and back to Hawaii than suffer through a US airline.
Another alternative is endorsing to Northwest by BUMP (like Rule 240, except that you do this before check-in and you don’t need the airline’s endorsement). You can take your ticket to Northwest and have them pull your ticket over to them.
@jamar0303: That was supposed to be @generalassembly there (edit function, please?)
@:
Are there any airlines that are actually worth flying anymore, quality-wise?
Yeah – international flights. The few times I’ve been the Europe, I’ve been treated like a king on British Air and was treated as slightly better than cattle on Delta. Now while I’m sure that BA has it’s share of problems, I didnt see any of them.
Meanwhile Delta had the same in-flight movie mix tape on all the fights (and believe me, Hot Rod aint worth sitting through ONCE let alone four times), and they couldnt be bothered to focus the red/blue/green guns on the projector.
@Triborough: That’s probably because the Northeast Corrider is the only profitable track and subsidizes the rest of Amtrak
And they are now advertising this wonderful new service for international travel. If companies would spend less on empty marketing and more on services, what a change it would be. The word would get around who was really good. Why won’t any company grasp this fact????
@: suggestions – lying that the flight was cancelled, still having a full plane when they had purchased tickets a year earlier? others listed in the article.
@: “I agree. I think there is certainly another side to the story, or at least more details that would reveal what really happened. While it’s sad that the family member was sick, it’s not really germane to the issue of what happened. I think kepler11 is right on in his assertion that it simply clouds the issue.”
In principle, you may be right, but you missed one important thing: when the OP was called to be informed of the flight “fuck-you”, they informed the CSR that: they had multiple family members flying together (which should take precedence over a couple of last-minute honemooners), that they had a relative who was dying at the destination and that they had a house rented at the tune of $10k. Those points may “cloud” the issue in some people’s minds, but it should have rung a very VERY clear bell in the United CSR’s tiny little off-shore brain that this was a situation they should resolve, not shrug off as “business as usual”.
REMINDER TO SELF:
“Never book a flight with United.”
Corporations like United should truly be boycotted for actions like this.
I was attending a wedding in Europe in July. I bought the tickets in January
from a travel agent, figuring gas prices would only go up. The domestic part
of the flight was United, the European was Austrian. I worried for months
about such a scenario happening, but I got lucky and my tickets were
honored.
What was obvious however, was on the Austrian flight, there was this nice
clean plane. We were severed delicious salmon, and food that exceeded the
quality of many restaurants I’ve eaten at. On the return flight, we get into
the United terminal. They have 3 flights booked out of one lobby (smaller
planes). Massive over crowding, as it was designed for one flight’s worth of
folks. I watch out the window as I see about 15 maintenance workers beating
on the side of the plane with various wrenches. They eventually give up and
the baggage carts that were waiting turn around and go back into the bowels
of the airport. Needless to say, we didn’t get our luggage till 2 days
later.
Then we got on the flight, the plane was filthy, the toilet didn’t work and
there was no air circulation– it was broken as well. The flight attendant
said, he only had water. He brought out a cart. It said Swiss Air on the
side. I asked him and he said it was donated. Apparently the Europeans felt
some charity and gave United enough water for the flight.
It is without a doubt that United is suffering from mismanagement. I’m
scared to fly with them again.
@waffles:
Did they really “admit that they lied”? They were just forced into a corner where they could no longer plausibly deny it any more.
And the lawsuit should be a home-run/slam-dunk. $10K is a substantial amount of tangible damages and the “didn’t get to say goodbye to a dying relative” angle should really bump up the punitive damages. You really can’t put a price on being able to see a loved one one more time and juries know that. Of course, collecting your damages is going to be hard once United files for bankruptcy again.
My own personal United horror story jives with the experience these people had. After flying over Kansas to avoid a thunderstorm that closed O’Hare for a while (I was flying from New Orleans to San Francisco through O’Hare), we arrived at O’Hare to find that….
-United had cancelled two of the remaining four flights to San Francisco that day.
-United’s India-based call center had no idea what to do to get me to the west coast that day.
-United’s 100-foot-long kiosks were staffed with three people each to handle to masses of folks who were stuck in O’Hare.
-United decided to send the 777 to San Francisco on time, even though it was less than half-full – most of the passengers for that flight were stuck in the air.
-Instead of holding the 777 on the ground for thirty minutes to complete boarding and give the delayed passengers time to get to their connection, United opted to fluff their “on time departure” stats at the expense of 150+ people who were then forced to try and find seat on the two remaining San Francisco-bound flights that day.
So it’s entirely plausible to me that United would just send a flight off without paying passengers in order to meet some internal metric they can later advertise as a sign of “customer service”.
My ordeal happened almost two years ago, and I haven’t flown “Untied” airlines since.
All the airlines have gotten incredibly worse over the last few years.. I am a frequent (Platinum) flyer with American and this past weekend they screwed me on both my outgoing and incoming trip, Spending most of my daughters first birthday in the air, missing the first day of a conference, losing a paid hotel night…
I am officially boycotting American…
There is nothing that United can do for the OP… $$$ will not make up for the fact they will not be able to see their father again. I think we should take a stance against all airlines that consistently hold us hostage as they feel they are doing us a favor of taking our money.
@MercuryPDX: They already have “just because” – it’s called “overbooking.” Which is what happened to these folks. And bad P.R. isn’t going to hurt too much when there’s only, what, 3 airlines left.
@: To me, overbooking is “Attention passengers, we have oversold this flight and are asking for volunteers….”, followed by whatever version of “The Lottery” the airlines decide to enact to make it work if no one comes forward.
This family wasn’t overbooked, they were just plain booted.
This is absolutely outrageous. I am seething with anger right now. I don’t understand how a corporation can get away with this kind of abuse and nothing ever happens. Well, I know which airline I will NEVER fly again for my many business-related travels. Fuck you United. Shabby, really shabby.
IF they had confirmed seats, which isn’t 100% clear, and got bumped a whole day before, that’s just slimy on United’s part. Preparedness is a practice to be rewarded. Instead they got the shaft.
Not that I need to fly United (most of my travel is international), but here’s to hoping Jetblue and Virgin America open up more flights.
Let’s help her out and boycott United!
By now, I would have expected to hear some sort of “we’re taking this very seriously” response from United. The silence is deafening. Especially given that the San Diego paper ran their story two days ago. United should have been out in front of this thing within 24 hours. If they don’t care enough to comment on a screw-up of this magnitude? I can only imagine how much they care about the average traveler.
They richly deserve the massive boycott they are about to experience. And I’ll help.
Since no one else (even AdvocatesDevil) is truly playing devils advocate, let me do the honors. As a business owner, I feel it’s important to point out the contractual obligations of the consumer. There is no doubt ‘fine print’ that states which rights the airline reserves. And it can be deduced that one of their rights is to make decisions that protect their profits (they do have shareholders, right?). Not giving this family a letter that would basically make an eventual suit for the 10k an open and shut case was a smart BUSINESS move, IMO. And United is a business, not a “we want to make everyone happy all the time” organization. Profit matters more than the satisfaction of EVERY customer. If this family had been more paranoid, printed confirmations from the web using the printscreen function, than the insurance company probably would have refunded them. Instead, they relied on the goodwill of United to honor their original transaction. FOOLISH. This is a dog-eat-dog, fascist society masked as a democracy. GET USED TO IT. Learn to not trust anyone, or suffer the financial fallout for having faith in a stranger when it comes to your money. I know people will flame me, but I think and act in terms of absolute truths only. If there’s no evidence, it doesnt exist in my world. And I must say, this cynical, paranoid view of humanity has treated my financial stability well, I suggest you at least give it a trial run. I’m not saying I’m proud of being so negative, but I didn’t ask to be surrounded by all this greed, either. If you can’t beat em, join em I say!
well I’ll never fly united then. it’s one thing to contact a customer prior to the flight and say “Unfortunately the ticket price last month has increased substantially and we’re going to need to charge you more due to rising fuels costs. We apologize for the situation.” it’s a completely different thing to lie to the customer, and then deny it ever happened to an insurance company for little other reason than to be mean about it.
Every time that I was on an overbooked flight, the gate attendants would start announcing over the PA that they were looking for volunteers to give up their seats in exchange for a voucher on a future flight. They keep raising the value of the vouchers until someone eventually accepts.
Ironically, the only time I’ve flown United is when my Delta flight was canceled and they booked me on United.
If I was a lawyer, I’d advertise and/or troll around consumerist.