Hello Humans! I am on vacation! Like real vacation and going somewhere – not just this I don’t have to go to work or school! It’s been nice. I was home for a few days and of course I had to hit up all the good food places. Our flight was supposed to leave yesterday night around 8PM, but around one, my mom gets an e-mail saying the flight is cancelled. WHAT?! NO! So of course I do my thing and try to find out why it’s cancelled. I check the radar, we’re good. I check United’s site and it only says cancelled. Odd. Usually it gives the reason. So of course I call them and I get connected to this genius who asks me if I want him to look for another flight for us. No, I’m just calling to say “Hey, our flight was cancelled. Cool.” He finally starts looking, but of course, everything is already overbooked. Then we get a call while I’m still talking to this guy as he attempts to find a flight on another airline about how we were rescheduled for a flight on Friday afternoon via ORD (that’s Chicago). NOT ACCEPTABLE! There’s a reason we booked a direct flight for Wednesday night.
After about an hour of dealing with the guy I was talking to, the only information I got was that the flight was cancelled due to crew delays. Which turns out to be good for you as a passenger. If you’re not aware, airlines have a much higher obligation to their passengers when a flight is delayed or cancelled due to airline misfortunes and not weather. When it’s weather, good luck getting anything done. But as Genius told me, it was crew. After still not being moved to a direct flight on any airline for the next two days, I asked to speak to a supervisor. At this point, I’m well aware that Genius can do nothing and his supervisor is in the same boat flight wise, but now I’m annoyed, my patience is shot, and I am fed up. Not only do I want a direct flight, but now I want some type of compensation for dealing with everything. Genius (btw, the guy was attempting to be nice and do his job, but he was SLOW. And he was kind of an idiot. He kept asking me if I wanted him to check if a different flight was available. I mean… that’s kind of the whole reason why I called in the first place… Anyway) kindly points out that his supervisor won’t be able to do much in terms of a flight either, but I knew he couldn’t authorize any kind of credit, etc, so I opted for the supervisor.
When I finally got a hold of her, she had an attitude. I guess I would have an attitude if I had to work with pissed off people all day. Wait.. hmmmm… Some days working in an Admissions office…. Anyway, she tells me that her minion has done everything she could and she wasn’t sure why I wanted to talk to her. I kindly brought up the whole “You’re wasting my time, money, vacation etc” bit and that I wanted to see some kind of acknowledgement on that. Well of course her first reaction was to get defensive.
“The flight was cancelled due to storms. We’re not concerned about compensating passengers at this moment, we are simply trying to get everyone booked on other flights.”
“Storms? Your colleague just informed me that the flight was cancelled due to the crew. Plus I’m looking at the radar now and there are no storms in the area of either flight path.”
“Oh.” You could hear the disappointment in her voice that I was slightly more intelligent than the population that just accepts what you tell them as truth. “I see. Let me check the actual reason the flight was delayed, one moment please.” WHAT?!?!?! THE ACTUAL REASON?!? Why don’t you just tell me “Hey, I totally just lied to you, but you called me out, so I’ll go find out the truth.” No excuse. None at all. I was already annoyed, but that just threw me over the edge. She finally admitted that it was due to crew and offered $75 vouchers per person. Fine. I would’ve settled for first class seats to our destination, but $225 isn’t too bad either. Now for our flights. We ended up being rerouted in that too, but it actually worked out better. We were planning on driving the extra two hours North for the day, but now we land right there. And it was direct. And we didn’t have to get a hotel for the night yesterday.
But I’m still furious that the agent lied to me. Not a way to run customer service, United. As a former employee of United, I was extremely disappointed in how this situation was handled. Previously dealing with Continental and working for them first, I feel that it would’ve been handled much better pre-merger and with Continental. Sigh. At any rate, we’re on a plane and on vacation! More later! 🙂
flautician 