[lsprague]

I filed a complaint with UA, gave them 8 weeks to respond but heard absolutely nothing so am now going public. Here's the sad story of incompetence and negligence about how United lost my children.

My children, ages 5 and 9, flew unaccompanied from Moscow to Washington D.C. on June 15, 2012 on a United Airlines non-stop flight. A big trip but they are mature for their age and were looking very forward to it.

I was at Dulles at the international exit gate to meet my children following their flight. I watched as other people from the Moscow flight emerged. But my children were not there.

I spoke repeatedly with United Airlines personnel to no avail – I was either brushed off or after cursory checking told that they could not be located and there was nothing they could do. I felt that I would have been treated with more competency and concern if I had been reporting a lost bag, not two missing children.

After several hours had passed and after speaking with a number of United Airlines personnel both at the airport and by phone I became increasingly frantic. Finally I approached a retired volunteer at an airport help desk who agreed to help and after another two hours was finally able to track my children down. It turns out they had been brought to another terminal for domestic flights and sat down at a gate for boarding a flight for which they had no ticket.

I was flabbergasted that this could happen – they were not scheduled for the flight and in any event transfers of unaccompanied minors between aircraft is prohibited by United Airlines’ policy. United Airlines had my cell phone number but never called, and my daughter said that she tried to tell the UA employees where I was but was ignored.

So after a long flight alone that started out poorly due to the incompetence and rudeness of UA personnel in Russia (another sad tale too detailed to relate here), my children were then subject to the trauma of being transported throughout Dulles Airport like cattle and almost put onto a plane for which they had no ticket. It was only over 5 hours after their plane landed that we were reunited (no thanks to UA, I might add, but only the selfless assistance of a retiree volunteering her time at the airport).

The final icing on the cake is that after all this United Airlines also lost their luggage and, in travel to our final destination the next day, multiple people were issued boarding passes for the exact same seats we had on the airplane.