Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Remove United from your flight results

dropunited.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 293 posts

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#251

Post by iplaw »

I fly quite a bit for my business, sometimes traveling with a premium carrier in first or business class, but equally often with low cost carriers.

Out of all airlines, United has given me the most problems. Due to my "priority status" with most airlines, I am likely sheltered from the brunt of the harassment, but I often witness other passengers dealing with toxic attendants, overbooking situations, crew movement taking priority, and so on.

Emirates is my primary international carrier. However, for many of my international trips out of DFW, United is one of the only premium carriers available.

Truth be told, my best experiences have been with Virgin and Southwest.

Virgin is now my go-to carrier when flying longer-haul domestic between destinations within their market. The Wright Amendment previously crippled Southwest's usefulness but, since it's removal, I find myself flying with them more and more often. Love Field, due to its size and location, provides such a painless travel experience in and out of Dallas. The alternative is flying via DFW, which necessarily adds over an hour of traffic delay each direction and maybe half an hour of TSA delay, even with pre-approval, when compared to Love Field. Saving 2.5 hours each time I fly is quite the value proposition.

Given these United revelations, for international flights, I will try to book with other carriers more often - Luftahansa, Japan Airlines, Korean Air, Qatar Airways, AeroMexico, etc.

TL;DR: United truly is the worst. Virgin and Southwest are good. Use Emirates for international.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#252

Post by joezydeco »

ubernostrum wrote: post #201
jedharris wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know if United is a uniquely outsourced airline. I think that is quite possible and if it is, then it lends considerable weight to the likelihood that it is a uniquely bad airline. This is the kind of problem a company can get into when the people making the key decisions operate in terms of "metrics" that don't track reality well enough. Plus when a lot of the work is done by outsourced vendors, they pro…

Compared to the other two big US airlines, yes -- United has an earned reputation for slashing mainline service in favor of regional affiliates. People occasionally joked (only half joking) that if previous CEO Jeff Smisek were only legally allowed to, he'd have outsourced long-haul international flights to 50-seat CRJs. This also played a role in United's frankly abysmal on-time ratings; in order to have enough capa…

he'd have outsourced long-haul international flights to 50-seat CRJs...

Smisek did do it with the long-range 757s he gained in the Continental merger. Smaller plane, less crew...and just enough range to get back if the headwinds are light. If not, it's an unscheduled 90 minute refuel in Canada. Add the time to clear immigration and customs, and now you have 200+ people with a missed connection.

http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=699955

I've had it happen to me, it's not fun.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#253

Post by th4dv »

sitepodmatt wrote: post #10

United screwed up by not having a decent incentive system in place to avoid deplaning people. People have presented many options, including taking a ballpark figure on checkin, or whilst on the airplance a speaker announcement anyone to travel later for $800, wait a minute, $1000, $1200, okay great thanks folks.. That was extremely badly handled and shocking that no process was in place for this - as last minute crew…

> But this was the police/airport-security that should shoulder most of blame

Not really. It's the United that called those "cops" so they should take the full responsibility for their actions.

I'm still amazed that "overbooking" is legal though. It feels to me like it's a one big scam - airlines basically sell a product that don't have and it's absolutely fine by the law. WTF world?

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#254

Post by hasteur »

gabaix wrote: post #79

I was once in a small crash flying United. There was no major injury, but a lot of scare and a day of travel lost. United took good care of us, then I receive a 'sorry, here's $50 in credit' mail. I was stunned by how small the amount was. A few weeks later a passenger created a Facebook group, and we all started to share our experience. United caught wind of it, and sent us $500 credit almost right away, with bigger…

Creating the group scared United because you didn't have any unifying characteristic other than the event. Having people ruminate together could have been the fermenting grounds for several (or a class action) lawsuit against the company.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#255

Post by speakerjack31 »

I would like to first say that what happened to the guy was horrible and don't condone anything United did to him but I feel like this whole thing is blown out of proportion.

First they can legally bump you from a flight if they need to[0]. You have no right to walk on the plane and rosa parks your seat despite already paying for the said seat. This should have at least been explained to the passenger and the passenger should have said that he needed be on the plane for medical emergency. Was it an medical emergency? Not sure - he might have been in alot of trouble with his boss or something but no one has mentioned that he in fact had to be on the plane no matter what. Regardless I haven't seen a video of the interaction before he went wailing flailing through the seats.

This was a huge failure on part of the managers at United and they should be sacked as soon as this court case is dealt with. The fact is that they laughed in the face of passengers when someone mentioned they would have gotten off the plane for $1000 abhorrent. I imagine this is where they will lose in court.

[0] https://thepointsguy.com/2017/04/your-rights-on-involuntary-...

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#256

Post by donald123 »

paulddraper wrote: post #84
belovedeagle wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you were involuntarily denied boarding. The $800 offer is just that, an offer, and the carrier can set their own terms.

Isn't that what happened?

No, denied boarding means they won't let you board in the first place. In this case, he already sit in his seat.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#257

Post by donald123 »

what_ever wrote: post #164
donald123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also, those $800, $1000 are just United voucher. The worst is they only issue 16 or 20 $50 vouchers, you can only use one voucher each time, and can only book through phone (which some people say is usually more expensive than online), oh and expire after a year. When more people know that, they are not stupid, it's useless even if they give you $10k. Basically they caused this no volunteer situation themselves.

This is false. I have volunteered for flights on United in the past and I have a got a single voucher of the total amount ($800 and $500). Also I can use it online. I received them less than a year ago.

It's not false, it's from someone else's experience. Maybe it's up to different gate agent or airport to decide what they'll issue.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#258

Post by MR4D »

hamami wrote: post #182

While I didn't have terrible experience comparable to some recent events, I also want to share mine. Last year when I was flying United I printed my boarding pass from one of the kiosks at the airport, and it assigned me to a seat where there's slightly more legroom, normally I believe these are upgrade seats, but I assumed there's no other seats so it gave me that one. After I and several others boarded the plane, o…

The only way I've found to protect against this is by being paranoid.

Whenever someone asks for my boarding pass, I show them my phone, while the paper copy is safely in my pocket.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#259

Post by Mithaldu »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #208
hamami wrote: post #182

While I didn't have terrible experience comparable to some recent events, I also want to share mine. Last year when I was flying United I printed my boarding pass from one of the kiosks at the airport, and it assigned me to a seat where there's slightly more legroom, normally I believe these are upgrade seats, but I assumed there's no other seats so it gave me that one. After I and several others boarded the plane, o…

O_O, so let me get this clear—the first agent literally changed your seat assignment on their own and gave you a new boarding pass with a new seat number without telling you anything? Wow.

They didn't "change" anything. That would mean it was a mistake of omission in informing him.

They stole his boarding pass, replaced it with another one, lied to him about sitting in the wrong seat. This was done in the hope he'd be stupid enough to think he misread his boarding pass.

I'm not sure how official such a document is, but he might've even be able to sue them for forgery or at least fraud.

Re: Remove United from your flight results

#260

Post by vinay427 »

nyolfen wrote: post #209
vinay427 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between the two clauses I honestly can't tell if you're complimenting or criticizing the airline. In any case, I love the no-hassles baggage policy (checking in bags is far more comfortable assuming they don't get misplaced) and seat selection (especially when traveling alone). The easy to understand frequent flyer program and relatively friendly staff help as well.

a personal anecdote about SW and lost bags -- they put my and my mother's luggage on the wrong flight once a few years ago, and not only did they give us both $250 in credit, they also had a courier drive the bags to her home (an hour from the airport) the next morning. i was very pleasantly surprised.

Emirates once lost my bags on an international flight. It took numerous phone calls with confused representatives and almost two weeks to show up (after more than half of my trip) and I didn't get any credit for my patience. Considering this is an airline with supposedly good service on a transcontinental flight, I'm also very pleasantly surprised by your Southwest experience.
Post reply on HN