[SLWolfe]

I am very very upset over the Roanoke airport and United.

My daughter and I had a flight scheduled out of Roanoke to Chicago, then on to Rapid City, SD on Wed. October 9. We arrived at the air port. When we got inside, there was only ONE United customer service/ticket agent working. We talked to the ones at the baggage claim TWICE trying to get checked in but they said we had to go through her to get baggage checked in. (Our 1st time flying but our last with United).

But we were there about 45 to 50 minutes prior to our plane leaving. At the time we stayed back outside of the "fence in" area because there were other people at the counter.

The ticket agent was on the phone dealing with a man and his flight, apparently there was something wrong with it. She never even looked up to see if any one else was waiting in line NOR did she attempt to get any one else to help wait on the people in line behind this man.

After 20 minutes of being on the phone she finally waits on people ahead of us, and then the couple directly in front of us, we hear her tell them you have 10 minutes to get to the gate to get on board, and they take off running.

We get to the ticket counter, she looks at her watch, and says the cut off is 30 minutes and that's now. We told her we had been there for 20 minutes already waiting on her to get off the phone and to help the others in front of us. She flat out refused to check our luggage for the flight to Chicago and on to Rapid City.

We begged, we pleaded, as we had to be on that flight and into Rapid City by that evening.She refused to help us & in fact walked away from the ticket counter & said someone from United would come talk to us about getting us on another flight that day. After nearly an hour, someone did come but by then it was too late. We couldn't get on a flight to Rapid City that day and were re-routed to arrive a day late. We had to be there that day or miss out on a very important part of the reason our trip was scheduled to start with (which we did miss).

The ticket agent at Delta, next to the United, said that they should or could get us on another airline to get out that day and on into another airport that could get us in to Rapid City if someone from United would return to the desk to do so. We asked her to call for someone from United to come to the desk but it was still an hour. And they would NOT even talk to us about getting us on another airline, they just kept saying that they would fly us to Dulles (DC), then switch to go to Denver for nearly a 10 hr. layover in Denver, to not get to Rapid City until Thursday morning instead of Wednesday evening.