By ET

Each time when I fly United, I get into some trouble.

First of all, I think Jade was on the black list due to the fact that her name and birthday coincides with some criminal.  As a result, each time I travel with her, we would be checked at the airport.  She always has this “SSSS” written on her boarding pass, which sort of means that she needs to be searched carefully.  However, this has nothing to do with the stories we encounter with United.

On our trip from Boston to Hong Kong, we were told that our flight has changed.  The nightmare starts there, at the gate, the flight attendant mentioned casually that “have a nice flight to San Francisco”.  Wait a minute, I thought we were flying to Chicago.  Turned out that they just rerouted us to San Francisco, and I found that the boarding pass we got was only to Tokyo.  That not only means that we are having this one more leg on the trip, but also that we don’t know how to get from Tokyo to Hong Kong.   At SFO airport, we had only less than an hour to catch the plane to Tokyo, then I talked to a customer service person.  She took more than 40 minutes to type on the computer, then eventually asked “do you know you can’t take kids with American citizenship outside the border without a permission?”  I was so furious: isn’t this an immigration question that is supposed to be asked by INS rather than a UA employee?  Finally, she decided not to issue me the boarding pass from Tokyo to HK.  We went to the gate, and it closed immediately after us.  At Tokyo airport, we got the boarding pass, and when we finally arrived HK, it took us more than 32 hours door-to-door.

Then on our recent trip from San Diego to Hong Kong, our flight from SAN to SFO got canceled again and again, until after the 4th time.  I talked to a UA agent, she almost agreed to reroute me through Chicago, and we would have to stay one night in Chicago. Then there was a flight, combining people from 3 flights going to SFO.  We were able to get on it because I’m a Premier flyer with UA. The connection time for us was less than 30 minutes.  Fortunately we made it, can’t imagine to wait overnight with two hungry and tired kids.

In my most recent trip from HK to Boston, the original plan was to go through Chicago.  And the agent rerouted me to SFO again, due to the previous bad experience, I said no.  Then she asked if I agree if she put me on first class, I said yes.  The flight was fine.  Then in my second leg going from Boston to Minnesota, the flight got delayed for multiple times again.  After waiting for 4 hours, the plane took off.  When I arrived, I found that my luggage was gone.  Not just me, everyone on the same flight got luggage mis-placed.  I checked the belt, and found that the luggage coming out were supposed for San Francisco. I had a professional conference in Minniapolis, and I was wearing NIKE,  shorts and a t-shirt that says “UNDERCOVER”.  Took 24 hours for the luggage to arrive, and I literally wore that kind of funny outfit to the conference.

UA’s online bagtrack service has some information, but it is not up-to-date.  It gave me no information until after the luggage got delivered.

The take-away from these:

1. Next time when I travel, I’ll carry a small bag with necessary stuffs stuffed in it.
2. I’ll put a tag INSIDE the luggage giving my name and itinerary, in case the airline tags get messed up.
3. Online check-in can’t save too much time, especially when your flight gets canceled.
4. I might consider other airlines next time, Cathay-Pacific, or Dragon Air, maybe Singapore Airline, UA just exceeded my imagination of messing up all the flights.

By ET This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 6:19 am and is filed under General, Information, Life, Random Thoughts, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.