More Fun with United Airlines

The Significant Other and I planned to fly across the country on United Airlines today.

Yesterday, the SO checked our reservations and learned that one of the tickets, purchased 10 weeks ago, had been cancelled. A bit of a surprise, but not unusual for United.

There followed an hourlong phone discussion, first with a truculent United agent and then a supervisor.

Their message: yeah, we cancelled your ticket for no reason, and, no we didn't tell you -- tough.

Sucks if you trusted us.

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People who live in  cities with United-dominated airports -- Portland OR or San Francisco, in our case -- have understood for years that episodes like the one above are part of the fun of doing business with United.

Now people in the New York area, where we live now, are getting the message.  United merged with Continental Airlines a couple years ago, and it now controls more than 75 percent of flights at Newark Liberty and more than 70 percent at Kennedy.  (This has allowed for big increases in airfares, of course, and it has been speculated that airline unions convinced the Justice Department to turn a blind eye to anti-trust concerns in this itty bitty circumstance.)

United's treatment of customers in the East is pretty much as we recall from our time on the West Coast, although, to be fair, the flight attendants aren't quite as mean as they used to be.  Perhaps the Continental employees are influencing the United culture in a good way.  There's always hope.

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The last time we flew out of Newark, the jet arrived at the gate in good time.  After passengers had lined up to board the plane, the gate agent announced that our flight had been delayed because it lacked "a pilot."  The delay was estimated first at 30 minutes, then 60 minutes and on and on.  Three hours later, we took off.

In fact, our pilot had been at the airport the whole time.  United delayed a 200-passenger flight for another pilot who was dead-heading back across the country.

Interestingly, the dead-heading pilot could have taken a later United flight that arrived four minutes after our long-delayed flight actually landed.

Long story short:  United wasted 600 hours of its passengers' time to save four minutes for one of its employees.  And lied about it.

Such a funny airline.