United they Stand: Against Customer Service (United Airlines)

Member Name: Bridgend boy

Product:	United Airlines
Date:	25/04/02 (575 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Can listen into the Pilot

Disadvantages: Food, Customer service

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking a holiday to the West Coast of America and Hawaii. (Excuse me while I just pick up that name I just dropped). While the holiday, as you can imagine, was awesome, there were certain aspects of the United Airlines customer service that were certainly not awesome.

Actually the title to this op is slightly misleading. They weren’t that bad. (Certainly better than American Airlines, but then that’s not difficult. I think I would be better than American if I offered people piggy backs to wherever they wanted to go.) However, there were a couple of incidents that could have been handled better by the United staff. I’ll get them out in the open early and then talk about the good things they do.

The first annoying habit they have, is holding a number a seats back and allocating them at the gate. Don’t misunderstand me, I know why they do this, but when they refuse to allocate you seats when you already have numbered seats on your original ticket, it’s a little annoying.

This happened to my wife and myself when we flew home to Heathrow from Las Angeles. (Oops, there goes another one). When I asked the gate staff why we had to wait for our seat allocation when our tickets clearly stated seat numbers, they were very dismissive and told me they would do their best for me and to sit back down. I then explained to them that my wife was pregnant and that it was very important that we sit together. They couldn’t have been less interested if they’d tried. They practically ordered me to sit down. This has a number of consequences:

1) It leaves you very disconcerted. Not one person actually reassured me that we even had a seat on the plane;
2) You have to hang around by the gate and are unable to go and get something to eat or drink (and believe me, that’s something you certainly want to be doing if you’re going to be flying with United. To cal
l their in-flight food pig-swill, would be an insult to pig-swill. I would have welcomed pig-swill with open mouth).

The second incident that annoyed me was their refusal to supply my wife with a drink, even though no stewardess had been round the plane for approximately 6 hours. No, I’m not joking. When my wife resorted to walking to the back of the plane to ask for one, she was told to sit down, as they would be around soon. “Soon” turned out to be one and a half hours later.

What tremendous customer service, I think you’ll agree.
This was made especially annoying when we could clearly see the passengers in economy-plus being pampered beyond compare. Thank god I couldn’t see first class.

However, those incidents aside, on the whole they weren’t that bad. The main reason we booked the holiday with them was the price. We had three nights in San Francisco, six nights in Honolulu followed by three nights in Las Vegas. Six flights in all. This whole holiday actually ended up being about £400 per person, cheaper than a two week fly drive to California with Virgin (Our original idea).

Their in-flight entertainment wasn’t the best I’d ever come across, although that may be something to do with the quality of films on general release at the moment. The saving grace for their in-flight entertainment has to be the audio channel “From the Flight Deck”. At the pilot’s discretion, you are allowed to listen in to all conversations between the plane and whatever particular tower they happen to be communicating with at the time. This is excellent if, like me, you are a nervous passenger. At one point on the way to SF we went through what I would consider to be extremely bad turbulence. It was so bad that the cabin crew had to strap themselves in for twenty minutes. Ordinarily in that situation I would have been mentally making my peace with the world, but I calmed down con
siderably when listening to the pilot reporting some light to mild chop to the tower on the ground in a very matter of fact manner. Then I heard an Air Canada jet somewhere in the area tell the tower that they had just come through some light turbulence. My god, I thought, we’re not even into turbulence yet. This is just mild chop. When I realised the Air Canada jet survived the mild turbulence I was fairly certain we’d come out of the chop alive.

So to recap, the good points about United are:

l Fairly cheap;
l Good network;
l A generous mileage points program. (I’ve now got enough for a free flight to Nice, which is nice);
l From the Flight Deck, audio channel.

The bad points:

l Dubious customer service.

On the whole, pretty good. I would fly with them again (if only for the flight deck communication) but I will look around for alternatives in the future.

Summary: