[sjkoetter]

Beware US Airways Puerto Rico.


On Sunday March 27th, my wife and I were returning from a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico. We arrived at the gate at 12:30pm for our 12:45pm flight to Charlotte on US Airways 1031 and attempted to hand the agent our boarding passes. The ticket agent (Tanya P.) closed the door and said the flight was full and our tickets were reassigned. The airplane remained at the gate for another 15 minutes and then pulled away at the scheduled time of 12:45pm. We were informed that our checked luggage was on the aircraft, but we needed to be standing at the gate 30 minutes prior to departure to ensure our tickets would not be given away. This is unheard of and is a clear violation of US Airways policy.

I let her know that her explanation contradicted the posted procedure (there is a sign at the ticket counter and at each gate indicating last opportunity to board begins 15 minutes prior to departure and doors close 5 minutes prior to departure) and asked to see the communication to travelers that supported her claim. She was unable to do so. The agents just kept saying they were sorry that we missed our flight.

This description of the incident is one of the issues. Our point of view, reinforced by the printed signage at the ticket counter and each US Airways gate, indicates that we acted within the stated policy. The US Airways agent did not act within the stated policy and gave our seats up prematurely. This was also reinforced by witnessing multiple passengers on the remaining flights that day board airplanes six (6) minutes prior to departure, ten (10) minutes, even as little as two (2) minutes prior to departure without issue.

Ultimately, the Agents branded us as the guilty party. This also leads to us having very low priority on any standby list as well as being informed they had no obligation to offer us food vouchers or hotel vouchers. Our position was that we were victims of US Airways operating outside the posted policy.

After not being able to board any of the 6 remaining flights that day as standby passengers, we were told to come back tomorrow and try standby again. However, all of those flights were oversold also by up to 13 passengers. The next flight out with open seats was Wednesday (3 days out), but we’d have to pay a change fee to be confirmed on that flight. Outrageous!!

We asked to speak with a supervisor (Edgordo –spelling?), who refused to speak with us. The agent hung up the phone with the supervisor and relayed his response, which was to show up the next day as a standby passenger. The agent gave us a customer service number to call if we wanted to talk with anyone else.

We called the number and spoke with three (3) different people identified as supervisors during the 74 minute phone call. All said that they were unable to help and our only option was to show up at the airport the next day as standby passengers.

It was a classic bureaucratic machine at work. We were not the only passengers affected by USAirways that day (for the next 3 days all flights were full and the majority of flights were overbooked by up to 13 passengers). The agents and supervisors go through this every day and they know exactly how to play the game.

We checked into the San Juan Airport hotel, which we had to pay for, and called Orbits for Business, which is who we used to book our original flight. After a 12 minute conversation, we were booked on a flight out at 7:00am the next morning (3/28) on Airtran, which did cost us $850. Nine hours getting nowhere with USAirways – 12 minutes with Orbitz and we have a solution.

After returning home, I wrote a letter to US Airways customer relations. The interesting thing we found out when in their response (they could not help us either, of course) is that their records show our tickets were reassigned at 12:39pm (6 minutes prior to departure). Learning this only increased my outrage as it was inaccurate. They either processed the change as we were arguing with the agent during the incident, or the time was changed later. There was never a dispute that we were at the gate at 12:30 (15 minutes prior to departure). No watch, clock, or agent disputed this. If there was a dispute about the timing of the events, the agents would have enthusiastically pointed this out to us, which they didn’t because there was no dispute. Their stance was that we were required to be there 30 minutes prior to departure. Again, not consistent with posted policy.

Beware of US Airways in San Juan. You may not get out. It seems to be standard operating procedure to overbook the flights and operate outside of their policies. They then tag the customer as the guilty party and leave them stuck for days on your own dime.



I've read other posts on this site about very similar stories. US Airways seems to have a habit of violating their own policies and tagging the customers with the blame.