I agree, a lot of gaff - I wasn't sending this to the airline, just trying to establish why I am so angry with United and am willing to take action, but me having to stand around in hot weather with no sunscreen isn't something I'm blaming United for, it's the failure to provide a reasonable service.
Working for a big company and having dealt first hand with service failure to customers, I can sympathise with United's attempts at doing what they could for me and the other passengers to get us to our destination. My point isn't that they didn't TRY, my point is that they FAILED.
If it was one failure and it was minor, I wouldn't have even said anything, but this was 2 in a week and on my first experience with United as well. It's a big coincidence maybe, but it happened and someone has to be held responsible.
They pride themselves in being the "#1 on-time US airline in 2009", but the planes landed approximately 24 hours late and 3 hours late, respectively. Thus, failing in delivering a timely service and causing great inconvenience.
They have a responsibility to passengers to provide a safe service and assure us of the reliability of the planes, however, two mechanical failures in a row doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence.
In their customer commitment they outline a contingency policy to "minimise delays of over 2 hours and prevent delays of over 3 hours", I would say that they failed in that contingency policy for both flights as well.
Checking airline stats between January and April, I can see that over 2000 services have been cancelled by United. It doesn't matter that it's only 2% of their total flights, 2000 is still a big number of flights to cancel in 4 months. That's about 16-17 flights they cancel daily at this rate. That's massive when you consider the amount of people that get affected on each plane.
If I was missing a day of work and had to take an extra leave day or something of the sort, then I wouldn't really care, but I was missing a memorial service for someone dear to me and it's reasonable for me to expect some form of compensation from them.
Again, I'll re-iterate that I appreciate they tried to do what they could for me, as is expected of them, but they failed and they have to answer for that. Given it was my first time flying United, I would at least expect some sort of goodwill gesture from them if they want any hope of retaining me as a customer.
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