Fly The (Sort Of) Friendly Skies (United Airlines)

Member Name: Teena2003

Product:	United Airlines
Date:	24/05/06 (3285 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: huge network of routes, part of the star alliance, some good pricing, self-service check-in

Disadvantages: have to pay for drinks in economy, some planes not the newest, self-service check-in

Over the years, I have been on lots of trips across the Atlantic to visit the good old US of A, either on business or holiday. And I had a choice of plenty of airlines when booking. So far, I have tried British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines and United. Once I even ended up on Air India – but the less said about that the better, I was too young to know the difference, then.

Of course, from that fateful day in September 2001 on, air travel changed forever and what used to be a pleasant trip for most of us has now become reason to think twice what airline we actually chose on long haul trips.

I have always tried to book United Airlines to the USA, on the odd occasion I was offered a slightly better price by different airlines but I always went back to United. I book with Expedia, an online company we use for most of our travel needs. They tend to have the best offers and prices.

We had flown to Las Vegas with Virgin (the only direct flight out of the UK) in January but after some disagreements with the service we got and their bad customer service afterwards when enquiring about their frequent flyer programme, we decided that we would go back to the reliable old United Airlines despite a stop-over on both in and outgoing flights.

It was a little more expensive to fly United than the airlines we were offered (Northwest or Delta) but we got amazing flights – out of Heathrow 8am via Chicago and arrive Las Vegas 1.55pm and back at 11.35pm via Washington, DC, arriving next day at 9.55pm. We didn’t mind that we lost a whole day in the air over the Atlantic because we had a chance to spend a whole extra day in Las Vegas after checking out of our hotel at 11am as there was no need to be at the airport before 9pm.

Checking in at Heathrow Airport is in Terminal 3, checking in area G. For anyone not familiar with Heathrow, that’s in the far right corner, almost an annexe and entirely taken up by United Airlines. There is only one long queue for all flights unless you fly Business or first class when you have your own queue I don’t know for how long it’s been the case but you are now shown to self-service check-in terminals if you have an e-ticket. There is staff at hand to help you if you get stuck but all your e-ticket number to call up the reservation. You have a chance to pick your seat (or change it if you had an allocated seat.) It’s all very straight forward, you even get an upgrade option to business class if there are seats available. There are only a very limited number of check-in desks open (mainly for business and first class).

My partner, his son and I had no intentions of using the self-service machines as we were hoping to get the extra legroom seats on the flight. It used to be that the seats they had not sold in Economy Plus were given to the first people who claimed them. And as I was always singled out for extra security checks I was able to secure one of those seats free of charge for most of my journeys – I always gave them the puppy-dog face when I was told I had to go through extra security (thanks to my German surname and passport).

But things had changed, the Economy Plus seats were no longer available on a “first come first serve” basis, United were asking for £43 per leg of the journey for the upgrade. We politely declined as it meant we would have to pay extra and worse still, would be split up for the flight as there were only limited seats in the middle of the plane, no seats together. Bah, first time ever I had to fly ordinary Economy on United.


It can take a while to actually get to your departure gate so check the monitors and leave with time to spare, just in case. As I mentioned before, I was singled out for extra security checks and had to go through a different channel. I had to take my shoes off and my hand luggage was inspected by hand, not just through the x-ray machine.

When it’s time to board it’s quite an easy process, it’s either by row, from back to front of the plane or by seating area (depending on the size of the plane from 1 to 5) with First and Business Class boarding first as usual.

Once on the plane, put away your hand luggage and take your seat. The overhead bins are usually pretty large so you can get a lot in there. The seats themselves are leather and you are given a pillow, blanket and headphones but no toiletry bag with little samples, socks, etc unless you are in First or Business.

It is very unusual for any flight to push back from the gate on time and even if they do, you are still in the long queue of other planes leaving so it might take up to 20 minutes to taxi to the runway and take off.

On board all United Airlines planes, well, at least the ones for long haul, your seat will come with it’s own little TV monitor for inline entertainment. In most cases you have up to 5 movie channels, cartoons, comedy and factual as well as a variety of audio channels. The remote for the channels is in your armrest. Headphones are provided for all passengers. Flying into Chicago there was a choice of a number of movies, but none of them were what I would call current. There was ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ which I dipped into occasionally, Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and the Narnia movie but they had all been out of the cinemas for ages. United used to have some of the most recent cinema released on their planes but no longer. It’s the same old boring movies you can already get on DVD. Even Virgin had better movies when we went in January. Very disappointing.

The next disappointment came when I was expecting the drinks trolley to serve me with loads of lovely alcohol for the flight. But United Airlines have cut back drastically on serving free alcohol. The trolley still arrived but you have to pay £2.00, €3.00 or $5.00 per alcoholic drink you order. Soft drinks, juices and coffee and tea are still free. As far as I could see, nobody ordered anything alcoholic. First and business class still get their free alcoholic drinks – after all, they paid a king’s ransom for the seats so they can expect alcohol to flow freely. Only flight on the Pacific routes offer free alcoholic drinks. I was a little annoyed in particular at mealtime when they didn’t even offer a wine with the hot lunch. And I was disappointed when Virgin only allowed one alcoholic drink per passenger and one tiny glass of wine when serving their hot meal.

The staff offered water and orange juice during the flight and at one point during the flight they came round with ice cream, snack-size Toblerone chocolate and packs of mini Scottish shortbread biscuits. You were allowed one of each.

Approx 1 ½ hours before landing you are served a snack meal. This normally consists of some sort of bread roll with filling (ham and cheese in most cases) and crisps. If you are on an overnight flight, you will get some sort of breakfast, roll, jam and fruit salad.

Apparently United are proud to brew Starbucks coffee. As a matter of fact, they should either get better people to brew it or ask for their money back, the coffee tastes like dishwater.

You are welcome to walk around the aircraft but are asked to stay in your own section of the plane, so no wandering off into business class or to the back of the plane. And as I said before no congregating in the aisles.

So far, I have not encountered unfriendly crews on the United flights. I must say service on the 777 has always been impeccable but lacking a little on the other planes. The return flight from Las Vegas was via Washington DC where we had to change planes and got stuck on a 767, the crew looked a lot less happy and smiley. And that’s also where the lapses in service were most obvious. I know a lot of passenger just want to flake out as a lot had to get up early, or like us, had been on an overnight flight across the USA and lost a few hours more than most people due to the three hour time difference. We had left Las Vegas around 11.30pm and arrived in Washington DC at 6.45am and had a 2 ½ hour lay-over until our onward flight to London Heathrow (where we arrived at 9.50pm having lost another 5 hours on our 6 hour cross Atlantic flight).

Legroom, unless you are sitting in First, Business or Economy Plus, is not exactly what I would call spacious but you can get by. On the 767 there are two seats on each side of the plane with three in the middle, while on the 777 you get 5 seats in the middle row. It’s not too bad if the plane is not full to capacity and you can move around and find yourself a couple of seats to get yourself more comfortable but both my recent flight were fully booked and then it can get cramped.

We checked out the United Airlines website while we were in Las Vegas and it gave us the opportunity to check in online and print our boarding passes on a printer. You then simply drop your luggage at the special desks where it will be tagged and sent on its way.

We checked in at Las Vegas McCarran Terminal 1 and we were very surprised to see that everyone was asked to use the self-service machines. The helpers there had to explain to almost everyone how to use the system and it didn’t speed up anything as the computers didn’t work that well and not always retrieved the bookings and people had to queue to check in the old fashioned way. We tried (our booking was retrieved by swiping out machine readable passports) but we were not given the option to upgrade from Economy to Economy Plus – we were offered an upgrade to Business Class for around $500 per person, though. While we were tempted for a moment we decided against it as we didn’t fancy spending about £300 for extra legroom and a bit of free alcohol when we could get more legroom in Economy Plus. That is enough to give you a pretty comfortable flight.

We fought our way to the only open check-in desk. The person there was not particularly knowledgeable and we had trouble explaining to her what we wanted, a straightforward upgrade to Economy Plus at $73 per person (credit card showed just over £43) for the flight from Washington DC to London Heathrow as the seats on the Boing 767 are not quite as spacey as the ones on the newer 777 model and the extra 7 inches make a big difference.

Well, with the restrictions on free upgrades to Economy Plus and no free alcohol, we might have to look for another airline to take us to the USA comfortably next time. We heard that American Airlines have changed the seating and offer more legroom on all their flights. It’s certainly looking a lot more interesting now than it ever did before. We have to hope that their flights and onward connections are just as favourable as the United Airlines ones. In a way it looks that the airline has lost a faithful passenger to other airlines that offer the same service at better prices.

A little tip on the side, if you have a connecting flight to somewhere else, make sure you leave more than 90 minutes between connecting flights. You have to clear immigration at a gateway city in the USA which means a lot of flights will arrive from all over the world at the same time and it can take well over an hour to clear immigration, pick up the suitcase and leave it for the connecting flight.

We had 90 minutes between flights but arrived almost 30 minutes after we were supposed to and everyone on the flight was desperate but worried to get their connecting flight. We finally cleared immigration and customs with about 10 minutes to spare before our connecting flight was due to leave Chicago. We were still at terminal 5 and had to get to terminal 1, pass through security and get on the flight in less than ten minutes. We were extremely lucky that the connecting flight was late leaving and was still boarding when we arrived totally out of breath.

That’s where Virgin have an advantage over all other airlines as they are flying direct into Las Vegas and immigration at Las Vegas McCarran Airport is a lot more relaxed and a lot faster I noticed.

(© Teena2003)

Summary: one of the main carriers to the USA and beyond