My wife and her folks were supposed to arrive to Cleveland Airport twenty\nminutes ago, but the plane that is to take them there from Toronto has not\nyet left on its previous<\/i> leg (Newark to Toronto), so the best they can do\nto Cleveland will be at least 3½ hours late. Yet United<\/span> Airlines is currently\nshowing their flight as arriving 45 minutes before it takes off!<\/p>\n\n What pathetic data maintenance, inexcusable in a world<\/span> where\npeople have brains, much less in the age of computers.<\/p>\n\n The airplane used for this flight started its day in Atlanta, leaving on\nits first flight four hours late<\/i>, so United Airlines has\nknown<\/i> since very early this morning that every flight that plane\nwould serve would be similarly delayed, yet they didn't push a\nflight<\/span>-status update for the Toronto-Cleveland leg until well after noon,\nensuring that I couldn't<\/span> call Fumie at her hotel to let her know that she\nhad the day free. Instead, they sentenced her and her folks to a wasted<\/span> day\nsitting around at the airport. Joy.<\/p>\n\n I understand that there are delays in air travel (weather, equipment\nproblems, etc... ), but what really pisses me off is the stupid<\/i> information. As I write<\/span> this, I got a<\/span> real-time push notification that the flight from\nNewark finally<\/i> pushed off, yet on the same page they note\nthat<\/i> flight into Toronto will be\nthree hours thirty-six minutes late, they claim that the continuation flight\nwill be quite impossibly just an hour forty-five minutes late.<\/p>\n\n It's United Airlines pure, utter disregard for their customers.<\/p>\n\n The lesson I learned (besides that United deserves its horrid\nreputation) is that at least on United, when checking the In other United-Sucks news...<\/p>\n\n After my United-induced And as I mentioned on that frantic-travel post, I've been mostly\nimpressed with United Airlines' iPhone app. On the app<\/span> yesterday, I noticed<\/span> that info on my return-flight reservation had disappeared, so I checked<\/span> the\nreservation on their web site only to be greeted with a “this reservation\nhas been canceled” note. Doh!<\/p>\n\n Two hours on the phone with United last night finally got it cleared up. At first<\/span> they blamed it on ANA (the Japanese airline that brings me from\nTokyo to Osaka after United brings me from Ohio to Tokyo), and said that\nthey couldn't rectify things until they talked to ANA to confirm that I\nstill<\/span> had that<\/i> reservation. Unfortunately and somewhat unbelievably,\nUnited Airlines has no special way to contact their partner airline, so\nsaid they couldn't help me until ANA's USA office opened the next morning.<\/p>\n\n That's ridiculous, so at my own expense I called<\/span> ANA's English-language\nreservations line in Tokyo and found that my reservation was fine. So I called<\/span> United back and, after much delay I found<\/span> out the root of the\nproblem: on the frantic-travel inbound leg, they apparently never actually\nchecked me in on the flight I took,<\/span> so when I didn't<\/span> show up for the much\nlater flight that I had<\/span> been waitlisted for, their computer assumed I had<\/span>\nabandoned the reservation and canceled the rest of it.<\/p>\n\n Doh!<\/p>\n\n PS#1: this is my<\/i> rant, and so I don't<\/span> want to use it to collect others' rants about\nUnited or air travel in general, so at this point I'd appreciate comments of commiseration but not\nof others' tales of airline woe.<\/p>\n\n PS#2: after the hour it took me to write up this rant, they've finally\nupdated the estimated arrival time to Cleveland to actually be after the departure\ntime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Indulge me a rant...<\/p> Having flow hundreds of thousands of miles on United Airlines over the years (I had 100,000 miles\/year for many years, with perhaps 50+ transpacific flights in the 90s), I've always been inclined to like them, but I think those days are over.<\/p> My wife and her folks were supposed to arrive to Cleveland Airport twenty minutes ago, but the plane that is to take them there from Toronto has not yet left on its previous leg (Newark to Toronto), so the best they can do to Cleveland will be at least 3½ hours late. Yet United [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"\/i\/united-airlines-braindamage.png\")
\n