[chaunceybell]

The following is what I typed into the United Airlines website that pretends to collect communications from customers. In the end I could find no way to communicate my complaint and requests to United Airlines. There was no way even to tell them that they had "locked the door."

They have hermetically sealed themselves off from customer communications about their service. The following is what I attempted to send:

I attempted to send this as a complaint and when I pressed "Continue" below, twice the system disappeared the communication without doing anything with it (that I could see). So then I called on the phone and was told that the call center (in India) was having trouble hearing me on the phone and that they could not interact with this matter because they will not have the records of what they did available to them for another three or four days, so would I call back. I said no and asked for an email address to send a complaint to and was connected, I was told, to a senior customer service representative. After waiting for several minutes, the phone redirected my call to a several-layers-deep voicemail system for the most general customer contact, that would eventually have taken me right back to the same call center.

So now I am sending this as a "compliment" in the hopes that you read your compliments. You have perfectly isolated yourself from complaints.

We shall see. The following is my communication. If you read it carefully you will see that I am giving you a big gift, but I guess that you will not.

I recently reserved a flight from Vancouver to NYC (JFK). My client in Vancouver changed the meeting, and so I was compelled to cancel. My assistant made a timely cancellation of the ticket. She reported to me that the person who spoke to her on the phone was nasty, was on the phone for about 20 minutes in the process of cancelling the flight, and I was charged a "fee" of $150 for canceling.

Is this what you intended? I have traveled on the order of a million miles on United over the years, and if this is your standard cancellation fee, it is three times the largest fee I have previously encountered.

I would appreciate hearing from you what you intended - what your policy is on timely cancellations of flight reservations with United Airlines.

And, if this is not your standard policy, I would appreciate a refund.

Thank you,
Chauncey Bell