United Airlines review by John 2014-07-19

UA1218 DFW to Newark My original flight from Houston was cancelled because "crew not available" and I was rebooked to leave from DFW, where I joined my brother for our ultimate destination of Boston. What should have been a 3 1/2 hour flight from DFW to Newark, an additional connection not included in our original itinerary to Boston, took almost 9 hours--in the air except for a short stop in Cleveland (yes, Cleveland) to refuel. Watching the little plane move around randomly on the map displayed on our backseat TV's was most interesting. All of this was supposedly due to bad weather. However, the hurricane predicted was nowhere near Houston or Newark, although there were thunderstorms in the Newark area. When we finally got to Newark hundreds of people from a number of flights had missed connections and need to rebook. There were exactly 3 customer service reps available to help us. It took 3 hours to get rebooked and by then it was 2:00 a.m. (By the way, Ticket Counter reps who were approached said they were not allowed to handle rebookings even though they were otherwise idle. About 2 1/2 hours into my wait, a "supervisor" came to our waiting line to tell us that Ticket Counter reps had been authorized to handle rebookings. I wasn't about to give up my place in line to see if that would actually be the case.) In the meantime United sent me almost 30 emails, many of them contradictory, saying my connection had been rescheduled, had been cancelled due to unavailability of aircraft, had been rescheduled to an earlier time than previously announced, etc. One of the emails informed me that my brother had been rebooked for an early morning flight and that I had been rebooked for an evening flight. That in spite of the fact that I made the reservations for both of us at the same time on the same credit card and we received itinerary with both our names and arrangements on them. This would have meant additional transportation and hotel costs for us so we rebooked both of us for the evening flight and spent the remainder of the night and the following day in the Newark airport. All of this cost us what was to have been a full day (a day and an evening if we had arrived at 5:00 p.m on the previous day as originally scheduled) of sightseeing in Boston. The missed prepaid night of hotel stay and prepaid tickets for events that we missed cost us money on top of the lost time. I understand that United has no control over the weather, but they have cut services so close to the bone that they have no flexibility. No crew available? No aircraft available? No customer service reps available? Don't they have any redundancy, backups, stand-ins, understudies? Whatever they might call them in the airline industry! I will say that the vast majority of United's personnel were very courteous, patient, and helpful. It's company policies that seem to be at fault here. In the future I will do my best to avoid flights on United!