gavinshearer.com

« Five Years Of Journalin' | Main | Spot Ya Breakfast »

December 17, 2004

Fogged Out (or, "Why United Airlines Is In Bankruptcy")

I'd been planning to write this entry from Spokane, preferably using the (killer) free Spokane HotZone WiFi network. Instead, I'm typing from home.

There is a story.

Mary, Richard and I had air/car/hotel for Spokane this weekend. The plan was to go spend some quality time with my family before next weekend's utter craziness. Family time, especially when grad school is as nutty as ever, has become far more important to us all than exchanging consumer products on the 25th.

Sadly, Spokane's weather didn't cooperate - the fog over there was thick, omnipresent, impenetrable. We arrived at SeaTac and sat in chairs at Gate N12 ... only to watch our flight's departure time flip from "12:24" to "XCLD."

This is the fun part. I'm a longtime Alaska Airlines fan, but I do have a United Mileage Plus number. I thought I'd try United this time around, and see if their service was any good.

Big, big mistake.

United informed us that:

• they were not offering any more flights to Spokane today (so waiting for a later one was no option),
• we were welcome to wait until tomorrow for a flight, if there was one (but they were not going to pay for our hotel);
• our tickets are nonrefundable (so we can't get our money back);
• they would, however, be commissioning a bus to Spokane for our "convenience and comfort" which would take about SIX HOURS (approximately 600% of the published travel time of our flight) to get there and would be leaving "whenever they figured out who was going to be on it." (Note: Mary doesn't do well on long car trips - hence our desire to fly in the first place).

Finally (and this is the best part), exchanging our tickets for equivalent travel at some future point in time (like, February, or March - we ARE going to go back out to Spokane eventually) was possible, but there would be a $100 fee, per ticket, to do so. (Note: United tickets from Seattle to Spokane cost less than $100. Do the math.)

I'm pissed.

The "nonrefundable" bit really gets me. I understand that tickets are nonrefundable to prevent consumers from booking flights and then blowing them off. I mean, if I bought a ticket for a noon flight and then just didn't show, I should be penalized for that. Fine. However, when the AIRLINE makes a decision to cancel a flight, I should either a) be given a ticket to fly at some other point in time, or b) be given my money back. If I wanted a frickin' bus ride, I would have bought the damn Greyhound ticket in the first place!

For the record, Greyhound would have run $63 per person. We paid about 50% more than that on purpose, because the airline offered a different service that was more suited to our needs.

The United people, however, had that studied, bored, please-finish-your-sob-story-soon-so-I-can-go-on-coffee-break demeanor. They just didn't give a shit (and could we please move along?).

Now let's compare and contrast my service experience with United with that of Sharon, the Phone Goddess at Expedia, who took my call and promptly went about phoning both Marriott and Avis on my behalf in order to get our standard, less-than-24-hours'-notice cancellation fees waived (she was successful). Sharon was so cool about everything, in fact, that if you want to see a picture of her, just look in the dictionary under "Best Customer Service ... Ever." No, really. She was that great. Book with Expedia, and tell 'em it's because Sharon works there.

So tomorrow, I begin the fun process of writing a letter to The Powers That Be at United in order to get my money back or, at least, get replacement tickets to Spokane.

In the meantime, the chances that I'm going to fly United are basically nil.
Learn from my mistake. I'll update here as it goes.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at December 17, 2004 7:02 PM. Posted to Misc.

Comments

Post a comment

« Five Years Of Journalin' | Main | Spot Ya Breakfast »