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I was flying United Airlines from Denver International Airport (DEN) to Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) yesterday and was excited to be heading home after two conferences in two different cities this week. My flight was on schedule, we boarded on schedule, I asked the flight attendant if Wi-Fi was working (affirmative), and all looked great. All looked great until the captain came on overhead and said a mechanical issue was going to cause us to have to deplane.
I was seated in First Class and was one of the first people off of the aircraft. I approached the gate agent (we’ll call her “Mary,” as I did not actually get her name) and asked her for some rebooking assistance as I was still showing as boarded on my original flight. Mary got flustered. She started typing and said that she needed her colleague to let her know what to do with rebooking. Then, she told me to use the United Airlines app. The app is great, but it showed me as on the flight and did not let me change the flight myself. I told her this and she advised that I buy another ticket and then take whichever flight left first. I told her that I did not think this would work and that the system would cancel one of my tickets. She told me that she was sure I’d be fine.
I booked a second ticket for $430.48 in First Class on the United Airlines flight UA1397. I now had a seat on my original flight (UA1156) and the new one.
Mary was confident that I was fine as she attempted to help the line of passengers snaking through the gate area. As soon as I left the gate area, the cancellation email came through. I knew that the system would not allow me to have two seats on two different overlapping flights.
I now was cancelled off of my original flight and was on a flight leaving in a few hours. I went over to the Capital One Lounge in Terminal A (which was so crowded, dirty, and off-putting that I only spent a few moments there) and then went back to Terminal B to try to get onto my original flight. It had the aircraft swapped and was departing before my 7:24 PM flight, which got delayed to 7:45 PM.
The original flight ended up taking off with three empty First Class seats, 48 empty Economy Plus seats (including the exit rows), and 109 Economy Class seats empty.
My Takeaways:
- Denver International Airport (DEN) is a horribly designed airport. United’s customer service there is ridiculous. I was told that if I wanted to go to customer service that I would need to take the train, leave security, and go to the ticket counter.
- You should not book a second flight and should push the gate agent to rebook you if possible. If the gate agent seems incompetent, call United.
- I hate the Boeing 757-300. These dinosaurs are not fun to ride on, I hate the First Class cabin layout, and they have frequent mechanical issues. They will be retired when United takes delivery of its Airbus A321XLR aircraft, but that’s not happening soon enough.
Anthony’s Take: I was looking forward to getting home on time yesterday and ended up getting there three hours late. In the grand scheme of things, I felt worse for the passengers connecting in Chicago to Barcelona, Iceland, and other European cities as they were never going to make their connections. United needs to retrain some of its agents as this was not a good way to handle a mechanical delay.
(Image Credits: United Airlines.)
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Advertiser & Editorial Disclosure: The Bulkhead Seat earns an affiliate commission for anyone approved through the links above This compensation may impact how and where links appear on this site. We work to provide the best publicly available offers to our readers. We frequently update them, but this site does not include all available offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities.
3 comments
You admit you knew the rules of ticketing, and still bought the second ticket. Just because someone tells you to do something, why would you do it? In your “article” you admit you told “Mary” about the rules, and did it anyway. Why do people whine about breaking the rules, and then the consequences? If you know the rules, you also know delays happen. You aren’t so important that you deserve more than everyone else. Just suffer through the delay, don’t break the rules, and none of this would have happened. Your article is a waste of time.
Jonm75 is lucky he didn’t write the comment on “Your Mileage May Vary” because the Stalin of that site censors comments and sometimes even changes the meaning.
Yeah, buy a refundable ticket on Southwest, see what happens with the United delay.