Tag: United Airlines

Coming to America

We’ve got a pretty good routine working for flying to America.

It starts with driving down to Heathrow the night before the flight and staying in a hotel close to the airport – usually the Park Inn as it does park and fly deals where you can get a room and 15 days of parking for under £120. Doing this has several advantages:

  • Doing it by coach on Saturday morning would mean leaving Cheltenham at some very silly time in the early morning.
  • If there are travel delays you are pretty much screwed
  • An early morning start doesn’t fit well with a day that involves landing in Maine at 5pm EST (so 10pm UK time).

So instead we leave town after an evening meal, and after the commuter rush has cleared, and if there are delays on route it doesn’t really matter. We still have to get up early but 5am is a lot less ridiculous than 2 or 3am. We then hop on the Hotel Hoppa and it’s 10 minutes to the terminal with no major dragging of luggage down miles of corridors.

The only real gamble is the airlines… usually they’re pretty good but this time United Airlines let us down a little – UA 922 on Saturday was a tired plane, and apart from the wifi streamed movies via their app or browser it was like flying in 2001… a fixed set of movies running on a fixed cycle on a tiny seat back display and pretty uninspiring food (chicken curry or a pasta dish) and they’d managed to heat the butter up so you got a pot of melted butter rather and a portion of butter … However the cabin crew were friendly and were very pro-active in providing soft drinks throughout the flight and the legroom wasn’t bad for economy class.

New Yotk Liberty has a slightly odd layout – you arrive at the International Terminal (B) and go through immigration and customs.. then you drop off your luggage before getting on the Sky Train and going to another terminal (A) where you go back through security to get to the departure gates. But when you fly the other way you get a shuttle from A to B and don’t have to go through security again… seems very odd but that’s how it is.

The 50 seater plane to Portland Maine was basic as you’d expect and the turbulence that had wobbled the Boeing on the way down through Maine shook the smaller craft round quite a lot and the final approach into Portland was a bit of a roller-coaster ride.

But now I’m here for the next couple of weeks:

IMG_0457

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies : Part 3

Well they processed the refund sometime in the past couple of weeks. It appeared on the Credit Card statement we got the other day.

I still have heard nothing from them, not a sausage, not a peep, not a word. OK so they processed the refund : its only take them 5 months. I guess actually expecting the lazy tossers to actually contact me and tell me they were doing it is too much to ask. As for apologising to me for being fucking incompetent and saying they are sorry….. ha ha ha.

Not the sort of Customer Service an Airline should have – makes them look like a bunch of cowboys!

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies : Part Two

Early in June after battering my head against the wall over the fiasco with United Airlines and their inability to refund money they took from us I found that their refunds department now had an email address rather than a fax number( which they didn’t want to let people have). You CANNOT phone the refunds department… oh no, that would be too easy. So I sent them an email explaining everything and giving details so that they could process the refund properly and give us our sodding money back.

They never replied, hell they never even acknowledged that they had received the email.

So I sat and waited.

It’s now July 10th and they haven’t done a thing.

I notice that their refunds department now no longer has an email address on the website. So they now CANNOT be contacted by any other way than snail mail. I think this says a lot about them – their refunds department is not contactable easily or in any dynamic way at all.

So I’ve now written a long letter to their Customer Services department. Not that I expect them to do anything.

Next step is the president of the company : Glenn F. Tilton. I bet he doesn’t have an email address either, or maybe I should try Graham W. Atkinson who is “Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer”

United Airlines have basically committed fraud against us – they have stolen money from us and refuse to return it.

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies

I’m not in a happy mood at all.

At about 6am on Thursday February 28th we got a telephone call from Kathy’s sister telling us that her dad had died unexpectedly.

It was obvious that Kathy, at least, needed to get back to Maine as soon as possible.

To try to make things as easy as we could we wanted a flight that took her directly to Portland, Maine, rather than leaving her at Boston and having to take the Concord Trailways bus.

United Airlines seemed to do this so we decided to book with them. Rather than use the internet Kathy phoned them. United then took lots of details, such as her fathers full name, the funeral home he had been taken to and the name of the director of the funeral home. We assumed that this meant she would get some decent treatment from United or a decent air fair.

How wrong we were. The ticket was £499 (more than it was if we’d bought it on line).

We should have realised then, as previous experience of United had shown, that it was all down hill from there.

They promised us the E-ticket would be in the email soon. Nope.. after hassling them several times it actually turned up at 2pm on Friday 29th

So Saturday morning we drive over to Heathrow. We get there and United say they need the credit card that was used to buy the ticket (i.e. MY credit card) to confirm the ticket. So Kathy gives it to them.

She goes through security and I go home.

By the time I get home which is 5 minutes after the plane has taken off the United Airlines website shows that it will be landing 30 minutes late in Washington due to “operational reasons” at Dulles. On the plane they tell Kathy that it will all be fine. A couple hours out from Washington they admit they will be late but it is OK as the connecting flight to Portland is also delayed

So Kathy gets off at Washington and gets through immigration and customs and makes it to the gate to find the flight has closed and she cannot get on.

So she has to try to get on the next flight. Which she manages to do.

That flight is then delayed.

She arrives at her parents’  in Augusta at 03:30am EST –  a mere 26 hours after leaving Cheltenham.

So we think the crap has ended there.

No…

Mid March we get our credit card bill:

4 March : United Air US Ticket Mailed 15.00 US Dollars 29 Feb
4 March : United Air US E-TKT 871.42 US Dollars 29 Feb
5 March : United Air UK Heathrow 499.30 29 Feb

Only the 3rd transaction is the ticket we got emailed to us. The other two are phantom transactions invented by United Airlines. I mean who the hell would buy a ticket on 28/29th Feb for a flight on March 1st and ask for it to be posted – and how the hell do you post an E-Ticket?

So I phone them. They try to blame it on us booking on line. I explain that we phoned them so its all down to them. They agree a refund.

We keep an eye on the credit card… no refund comes through. They usually come through in a few days.

I phone them on Monday and I’m assured that they did process it on March 22nd but it could take “two billing cycles to come through”.

Wednesday evening it appears on our credit card.. a refund from United Airlines – for £218.30 . Now I knew the dollar was weak but how the hell can $886.42 turn into £218.30.

So yesterday I phone them … you just phone their customer line and ignore all the push button options until you fall off the end. I’m told that they cannot do anything that I need to contact the refund department. I loose it – I explain the whole situation that the fault is ENTIRELY United Airlines as they did everything and that frankly the way my wife and I have been treated by United in this whole farce is enough to put us off ever flying with them again. After about 20 minutes they tell me that they’ve pushed it forward to their refunds department and to phone back tomorrow for an update.

So this morning I phone and get someone who says they can’t see anything on their systems. Eventually they do and say “its gone to the refunds department” and to phone back “the end of next week”.

Is this really the sort of treatment you should expect from a company like United. They have basically ripped us off and kept nearly $900 of OUR money for in excess of a month and they don’t seem to want to give it back.

Fly United : fly the friendly Skies.

I don’t fucking think so.