We fly. A lot.
For a military family living in Southeast Asia, a round-trip home is 20,000 miles. Our daughter, about to turn five, has easily flown 120,000 miles. She idly draws pictures of immigration forms and filled her mom’s passport with pretend visa stamps, each one carefully within the lines. She has never thrown a tantrum even when she had only a ballpoint pen and me to entertain her for a 12-hour flight.*
Only once did she pee in the immigration line. In Singapore of all places.
All this is to say that we are low-maintenance passengers who take off their shoes and remove their laptops in advance, and why it is particularly upsetting to find that United Airlines keeps lowering the bar when it comes to treating passengers humanely. On a trip to the United States last month even a First Class Global Elite passenger came back to console me as I sat in the last row in my pee-drenched shirt, letting me know that she was going to complain to United Airlines on my behalf.
Here is what happened on our flight. I have deleted the details about being rerouted despite asking to stay on a delayed flight. And by delayed, I mean United’s definition of delayed, which is what they call a flight that did not arrive at the airport the day before.
I will simply focus on what happened after we had an unplanned seven hour layover in San Francisco after flying fifteen hours from Singapore via Hong Kong. It was in San Francisco, just as our flight to Baltimore was about to board, that my daughter finally passed out while playing and watching the planes. I picked her up and that is when I smelled the pee-diaper.
Unexpected seven hour layover after 15+ hours of flying. Thanks, United!
Normally, we do not pre-board. We know that many airlines no longer pre-board families anyway. But after waiting for the First Class and other elite passengers to board, I approached the gate and asked the agent if we could board early so that I could change my daughter before take-off. I mentioned that we had been traveling from Asia and had an unexpected 7-hour layover.
When I asked, the gate agent almost snarled and demanded to know my boarding group. We were in Group 3.
Well, now you are going to board LAST!
At that point I was standing there holding two pieces of carry-on luggage, a camera bag, and my daughter. I felt the pee-diaper soak through my shirt. I had been up for 24 hours and was still at least six hours from our destination.
I politely asked for her name and she told me it was Maria. Then she demanded to know my name.
Well, Mitchum, I don’t think I have seen your name anywhere on our list and I am going to note OUR records.
In the middle of boarding passengers, she went to the computer terminal and started typing. I was almost certain she was going to take us off the flight if she could find my name. Every seat was full. No exaggeration necessary: I wanted to cry.
I asked to speak with a supervisor and a lead gate agent arrived. He apologized and suggested I board. That is when I noticed that “Maria” had a United Airlines name badge that said “Arturo Chavez”. I asked another gate agent why I would be given a fake name and the reply was:
I don’t know, sir, but that’s her prerogative.
We boarded and were seated in the last row. So much for making seating arrangements in advance. It was my fault for not bringing along extra clothes for the layover, so my daughter spent the flight in a new diaper, without pants. She was mortified when she woke up.
During the flight a passenger approached me, identified herself as a Global Elite flyer in First Class and said that she was standing behind me at the gate and witnessed everything. She was appalled and asked for my name because she wanted to complain to United on my behalf.
We arrived in Baltimore just before midnight after traveling for more than 29 hours instead of about 20 hours.
We paid $3,010 for this vacation experience.
(* The pen won the popularity contest.)
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh. My. God. Appalling. Worth submitting to travel columns… What aholes!
Appalling, yes. And I am sorry you had that experience. But may I ask you a favor? Please don’t spread the blame for the the action of one tired, overworked, underpaid, and yes, totally out-of-line employee to make it seem like the company and all the 43,000 good employees who make United a safe, usually pleasant airline to fly, are equally to blame. The conditions that led up to your experience were put in place by senior management of United, beginning with Glenn Tilton, and his band of oh-so-typical-of-large-American-corporations-these-days horrible greedy management. The blame lies squarely there. And yes, “Arturo” perhaps should be fired, or at least sternly counseled, but for you to write “avoid United” because you had one completely unacceptable experience with one completely out of line employee really does a disservice to the men and women who have carried you and your family safely for so many hundreds of miles. Again, sorry you had this experience, believe me I am, but please, as a former employee (I’m laid off thanks to Tilton) of United, we and the company (what’s left of it) are not to blame, only those responsible for the act and for crating the situation that led to it. Thanks.
Joel, I appreciate your response and, in general, I think it is silly to avoid a company over one incident. If you can believe it, the blog post is the short version of a trip that was bad from start to finish and where I had to deal with rude or incompetent behavior throughout.
United has a 12-Step “Customer Commitment” list on their website. They failed four of them on the first half of our trip. But I don’t think this was isolated. Rather, as you suggest, it is a culture throughout the airline, and it certainly showed. And a culture of poor customer service deserves to be publicized.
1. We showed up early for the flight and were the last be ticketed because they didn’t add gate agents until the last five minutes despite an obvious problem. (Our flight was at 6:40am. The person ahead of me in line had arrived at 11pm the night before.)
2. Our connecting flight from Hong Kong to Chicago did not arrive in Hong Kong the night before. We were not notified of this “delay” from the previous day until at the ticket counter and the flight was boarding. I could have made better alternate routing arrangements.
3. I was involuntarily put on a new flight despite asking repeatedly to be kept on the original, delayed, flight and be allowed to change my itinerary when there was more time during the connection in Hong Kong. Instead I was put on a different flight and not told about the 7-hour layover.
4. At Singapore it turned out that the person ticketing me and insisting on rerouting me was not even a United Airlines employee, just someone else brought in (and not at the end of the ticketing process when things got hectic). I had to get a supervisor to try to stay on my original flight. This was as the last call for luggage was being called out…
5. I asked about compensation and was told to speak with a customer rep in Hong Kong (yet I was not allowed to delay the rerouting until I got there). In Hong Kong, I walked 30 gates with my child to find a customer service agent (Steven Lee) who refused to let me ask him a question and shooed me away in the direction of my gate (he looked at my boarding pass). When I demanded to be allowed to ask my question before he helped someone else, he scoffed at the idea of compensation and told me, repeatedly, that I had chosen to be placed on the San Francisco flight. At the gate, there was a very friendly agent who approached me and told me that Singapore had noted in my record that I was seeking compensation. She gave me a form. Mr. Lee did not even bother to look at my booking. He was rude and pretty much accused me of lying about the situation. The reason I asked about compensation was that I was going to arrive at BWI after midnight due to the new routing. Had I been allowed to keep my original itinerary — the flight to Chicago was not cancelled, after all — I would have possibly been entitled to a hotel stay in Chicago. Even without compensation I preferred to land in Chicago at a more reasonable hour and spend the night there. (In the end, I picked up a rental car at BWI and got to my destination at 2am. I chose this rather than seeking out a hotel after midnight.)
6. The gate agent in San Francisco made a scene in front of passengers and other gate agents. None of her colleagues intervened or pulled me aside to help me out.
7. A pilot began the trip by announcing “The flight attendants are here primarily for your safety. If you need other assistance, please let us know.” While this is true, it certainly sent the message the customer service is not a priority. Why would you do that? Again, it’s a sign of bad corporate culture that tolerates it.
Sadly, writing a letter to United will probably result in my getting a $50-75 certificate that cannot be used online. That is what happened when they broke my wife’s suitcase on a previous trip. We don’t need another useless certificate. I want the gate agent to be held accountable.
To be fair, no incidents on flight from BWI to SFO a week later, or SFO-Narita-Singapore on our return a week after that. From Narita to SIN they moved us up to Economy Plus. I am not sure if it was out of kindness or because they’d given our seats to someone else. In any case, it was appreciated.
And in the minutia department, the entertainment system and light did not work for the 12-hour flight from Hong Kong to SFO. Same for a passenger in the row behind me.
The problem is that when an airline behaves poorly, how else are you supposed to send them a message that they need to change, other than stopping giving them your dollars? I feel bad for the employees, but what so many people don’t seem to understand is that having crappy management is not an excuse to be nasty to people…
The biggest problem here is that you can’t get away from this kind of bad customer service flying here in the states by changing carriers; every major US airline (including both the legacy carriers and Southwest) has had incidents like this. I hope you get a useful response from United customer service.
Ed, you’re right, and the quality of customer service tends to come and go with each of the airlines. In our case, when my wife travels for the military or when we have a FEML trip (Funded Environmental and Morale Leave) we have to fly on a U.S. carrier if at all possible, thanks to the Fly America Act.
From Singapore most of the “U.S. metal” flights to the States are on United. So the reality is that we have to fly United in many instances and in my post I did not say that we will leave them. The good part is that you can earn Premier status after almost one round trip to the U.S.
But as for our next vacation, we will spend the extra money for Cathay Pacific or Singapore Air. The difference between them and most U.S. carriers is night and day.