[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.

[jimworcs]

That is absolutely disgraceful. I think you should consider going to the media with this story. If United had refused to assist me to locate my children after 2 to 3 hours, I would have gone to the Police. This case is outrageous.

[Sandra C]

On another strand entitled “How BA treats the elderly”

The following person “lostinlondon” wrote

“Since EU regulation 1107/2006 came into effect, the onus of providing assistance to passengers with reduced mobility at any airport located in a member state or when travelling from outside of the EU on a community carrier, rest exclusively with the airport operators and no longer the airline. Airlines have an obligation to inform said operators of any specific requirement made by one of their passengers as long as they were given at least 48 hours notice.
The OP should direct his/her complaint at BAA (British Airport Authorities) not BA whose staff would actually [U]not[U] have been involved in the accident.”

“Lost in London” is right that the Airport Authorities are responsible but the Airlines also have the power to demand better service from those Authorities!

The Airlines sure used that power in the States to demand better Security processes from the Airport Authorities after 9/11! In fact Airlines like United demanded of other nations that they improve their Security processes to come up to American Standards. That was at a time when many other nationsnalready had great Security processes in place particularly the UK and other parts of Europe. We even had better security Down Under at that time.

Before 9/11 United Airlines once sent my baggage ahead of me, when I was stuck because of weather. When I finally arrived in Denver at 2am my large case was sat in the centre of the baggage hall by itself. I told my friends that most other places in the world my suitcase would have been moved by a robot and possibly blown up. My friends laughed but those procedures are now in place in the States!

Security is really important as everyone now believes in the States after 9/11, so why was the security of these children seen as less important by United Airlines that the message did NOT get through about where those children needed to go and who would be collecting them.

The public is led to believe that the Airlines provide a service for unaccompanied minors – if that were not the case the parent would be negligent in allowing their children to travel! It is the Airlines duty to inform the parents of the procedure and state who is responsible for the child like the airport Authorities and get every hand-over recorded and signed – it’s not rocket-science to organize that. Far more difficult and costly to organize Security eh!

Eight years ago my ageing British mother came to visit us in New Zealand travelling alone for the last time. She was a great looking 75 year-old lady but we realized that she had early stages of Dementia. I became anxious about her return journey fearing that she would get muddled and lost so I phoned the fabulous Singapore Airlines asking if I should accompany her. Instead their representative suggested that they provide wheelchair assistance to keep an eye on her in the Singapore changeover and to ensure that she was delivered to my waiting sister at Heathrow London. I was assured that every stage of the journey there would be handed signature proof of every hand over of my mother; part of the procedure was my sister had to meet her at Heathrow and sign for her arrival. My sister told me that it was on the docket that our mother refused to get into the wheelchair in Singapore but a clever employee asked mum to push the wheelchair for her. Mum was delighted “to help” and we got her home safely.

The above procedure of signing over responsibility would be so easy to put in for unaccompanied minors.

After 30 years of travelling to and through the States I eventually gave up because of United Airlines, they are code shared with our airlines from Down Under and if you are buying a return ticket to Europe you cannot avoid United Airlines on that route. I now fly through the East.

I could write a book about not just the tardiness of United Airlines and missed connections but about their flippant abuse of so many passengers particularly the elderly and those in need. Businessmen were more often than not fawned over!!

One particularly nasty incident worth a mention:

Before our international flight began we had to deplane in Auckland – mechanical problems, I like that we would be arriving safe even if we were late and miss our connections.

We arrived in Los Angeles 19 hours late at 5.30 in the morning BUT the plane no longer had a place reserved at an air-bridge. So all the passengers had to deplane by descending the Jumbo Jets stairs and walk into the airport.

At that time I was using a walking stick so I elected to wait till the end so that my slow climb down and walk would not get in the way of other passengers. I therefore found myself deplaning with the elderly and infirm – at the bottom of that huge staircase were 5 personnel with wheelchairs. United Cabin staff handed the dozen people over to those waiting personnel and rushed off – they had done their days work but I knew they had rested because they work in 2 shifts on long-haul flights.

As I had worked for years with the disabled at the bottom of the steps I waited behind to give a hand where necessary to fellow passengers. The group slowly struggled the 100 meters to the airport, we were all tired as it had been a 12 hour flight after a very early start from the hotel we had spent a few hours in.

A few meters inside the airport it was found that a particular lift/elevator was not working because the people meant to switch it on had not arrived at work. The woman in charge had a phone and after a couple of calls she told the passengers that they would have to walk up the stairs, which turned out to be 2 flights! After ascending, obviously without the wheelchairs, we crossed 20 meters and were then told to walk down 2 flights of stairs to go to Passport control!

At this juncture I spoke up stating that descending more stairs was border-lining on dangerous because the people were elderly, not very ambulant and extremely tired. “They is no other way maam, perhaps you could give a hand!” came the rejoinder – had a walking stick myself but I offered to bring up the rear with a gentleman, who was kinda coping too.

The woman in charge did not escort the group to the front of the queue but was going to make those old darlings stand in line, so I went to her and suggested that she get more wheelchairs and more help. She told me to go back to my place in line! I told her to use her phone to get more help and get those people seated, which she did after the custom control!

She had a list of all of us and knew that we had missed our ongoing flights so she was picking out those that needed to move first for their new connections. Some wheelchairs arrived to escort people to different parts of the Airport but one lady without a wheelchair stumbled. I demanded that either more wheelchairs were called for or that the remaining people be allowed to sit for a while. She phoned then and she demanded more wheelchairs and the minute they arrived pointed to me and said, “Get her out of here!”

She had not only shown that she had no training in caring for the elderly and disabled but that she absolutely did not care – she said she was just “doing her job!” - whatever that meant!

If one of those people had fallen down those stairs someone would have been sueing and what surprised me the most was that two of those elderly passengers were Business Class!

I joined this site recently and I read first the United Airlines section and I note that they have not changed – the bad attitude is there at the top most level of the company board members and works all the way down and we are just the cattle that they ship around. Flew First Class with them once and that was OK but not as good as the standards of other World Airlines.

[Leatherboy2006]

I have the feeling that the OP might have stretched the truth about this a quite a bit.
While I don't have (and not fond of kids), I have had my nieces when they were little fly from Chicago to Dallas in the airlines care and I know if they had not come off the plane, there is NO way I would have waited several hours for an answer like the OP said they did.
They would have had to call the police within a couple minutes of the last person getting off the airplane if the girls were missing, cause their uncle would have been going apesh%t about were they were.