Maybe bankrupt isn't bad enough
Ah, United. Our hometown airline.
Trading horror stories about United's legendarily bad customer service is a staple of conversation among business travelers. (Some of the best/worst tales can be found on the site untied.com)
In previous jobs, both R. and I used to travel on a pretty-much full-time basis, flying good old United twice or more per week. So we've come to approach the experience with a certain grim good humor. No in-flight meal? No problem. Three hours late? Built it into the schedule.
But our recent United adventure might be enough to finally put us off flying them for good, despite the gazillion UA frequently flier miles we jointly own.
We'll skip the part of the story that involves R. receiving $600 in travel vouchers from United for their impressive screw-ups of a past trip.
Fast forward, then, to the part where a change in plans necessitated the last-minute purchase of airline tickets from Chicago to Baltimore. (We'd originally planned on making a road trip to visit my grandparents there.)
We shopped and surfed for decent fares, but came up with only two even remotely viable options: $600 for round trip tickets for the two of us on Southwest or $660 on United.
This seemed like exactly the sort of circumstance in which having an enormous amount of travel voucher credit would come in very handy, especially since we really didn't anticipate a lot more travel this year and the vouchers, of course, have an expiration date.
As it turns out, you can't apply one of these vouchers over the phone or Internet. You have to either go to a travel agent or go to the airport.
We thought heading to the airport would be simple. In fact, we'd work it in with a [terrifying] scouting mission to a suburban baby superstore.
That's where things first went wrong.
Because you can't just walk up to any old ticket counter and buy a ticket anymore. You have to go to "future ticketing," which is a tiny, airless office at the end of the terminal, marked by a very small sign.
The set-up in "future ticketing" makes those take-a-number deli counters look like an incredible innovation in customer service efficiency. There should be a sign that says "Abandon all hope . . ." but, instead, it's just written on the faces of the two (count 'em two!) agents who work there.
The first thing you're supposed to do when you enter is sign your name, and the time you arrived, in the logbook. And, of course, when you do this, you can't help noticing that there are 7 people in front of you and that some of them have been waiting for more than an hour.
But I had a magazine. And R. had his Treo, for e-mail and web-browsing. And we figured that the $600 was worth the wait.
Right.
There are, apparently, two groups of people who use the "future ticketing" office: those who have vouchers like the ones we had (people who have already had a bad enough experience on United to have been financially compensated for it) and United employees.
It was a little frustrating to wait for the United employees to finish their transactions, since they seemed to be spending a lot of time socializing, griping, etc. (Not that I begrudge them this, per se. It's an important part of working for any big corporation. But it should probably happen in some semi-private area.)
But it was truly alarming to watch the voucher people try to get their tickets. Like the guy who had multiple $50 certificates, each one representing a late or canceled flight, a screwed up seat reservation or similar. He'd waited an hour and ten minutes to spin all those accumulated travel hassles into one nice, relaxing trip.
Then the agent told him he could only use them one at a time.
"I waited over an hour to save 50 bucks?!" he exclaimed.
"Well," she told him, "actually, to save $30. There's a $20 fee to book your tickets in person."
Ouch.
About that time, R. punched up the United website on his Treo so we could give the agent the exact details of the flights we wanted.
As we waited for our turn in line, the fare went from $660 to over $800.
In an hour, only four customers had been served. There were still three people in front of us.
We left. (And paid $4 for parking.)
In the end, we decided we'd rather pay $600 for Southwest tickets than get a "deal" on the United ones. And I suspect we're not the only ones who are writing off United.
