[Matt_FLL]

Someone boarded a plane with a hand-written boarding pass. No, not last century--this week.

Yes, really, and here is a picture of it:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/unit...emwide-outage/


The United/Continental integration has been a disaster.
In fact, I am sharing a complaint… about the complaint department. Can we do that?

It appears that United Airlines is no longer able to read complaint letters due to overwhelming volume. It takes a lot for me to file a complaint in the first place, so I had to be pretty disgusted.

In essence, I subscribe to a 3rd party website (not affiliated with United) which is used to manage and track my flights. While at the airport, that website alerted me that my flight was delayed 3 hours, 30 minutes. One hour before my departure, I could have rescheduled my flight (and business meeting) with very little impact. I approached a gate agent who was standing behind a sign that said “on time”. She sarcastically laughed, “I can’t rebook you because some website says that you’re delayed”. Well, an hour later, the scheduled departure time had passed. The agent finally made an announcement that the aircraft was having mechanical problems and that the best case scenario was a delay of 3.5 hours. I then waited in line for over 1.5 hours to be rebooked.

Hence, my complaint which was submitted on their website. Three weeks later I received a completely irrelevant reply. Here is a snippet:

“I am sorry we were unable to respond to your request sooner. The merge of United and Continental Airlines has been a successful one, but there have certainly been challenges. An airline merger of this size has never been accomplished before now… While my reply is brief and not as detailed as I would like, I want you to know that I very much appreciate your business.”

The irrelevance and use of pronouns was suspicious. So I “googled” some of the text and found that same form letter was posted across the internet from other outraged people. It took them three weeks for a computer to send me an automatic reply.

Here is my modest advice, United Airlines:

Computer – Print boarding passes
Human – Interact with other humans and resolve human issues

Once you get that down, we’d all be glad to fly with you again.