If you are a frequent flier on United Airlines (UAUA) there have been some changes that might affect you in a good way or in a bad way, and it all depends on the location you want to travel too and the amount of time you pre-book your rewards.
If you are traveling business class in the US, if you are flying to Hawaii or Australia, be prepared to fork over more miles for those seats. Most changes involve travel on international flights and in premium cabins, where some rewards rose by 5,000 miles, to 70,000 miles."It was a difficult decision, but it's something we needed to do to lower our operating costs," said United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski. "We're also looking to introduce new programs that are focused on what frequent fliers say is most important to them," such as reward travel with no restrictions or blackout dates.
Which makes sense. If you want to upset less people, just offer the program at a higher cost.
But if you are flying less than 700 miles in economy, good news. Your rewards seat dropped from 25,000 miles to just 15,000 miles but only until the end of the year so book now!
Watch out for those new booking fees ($50-$75) on rewards travel if you book less than 14 days in advance.
Rocky Mountain News
In my opinion, lack of customer service, period, that's it
After spending October 14 in the Denver airport waiting for flight to Tucson, I will probably never fly United.
We were just about to board when we were all told to go back to boarding area. System problems, all flights were being held up. I fully understand that things happen and that there are times when we must wait to make sure all is well before continuing on our flights. We waited about 2 and a half hours while other flights were also being delayed. United repeated to inform us of system problem with no ETR on these problems.
Then United had this brilliant idea, lets cancel some flights and send everyone on these flights to the customer service booth. Landing about 90th in line waiting over 3 addition hours for someone to please try and help me get to Tucson. No person came out and offered a chair for the elder, water, coffee, soda anything to attempt to make this wait in the line easier. No person came out to explain what was going on and why it was taking so long to get help. We stood there not moving watching minute, hour go by that was becoming less and less likely to catch a flight out.
How I got out of this airport was by my own investigating and pursuing of information, I did get a flight into Phoenix, rented a car to Tucson. I was told by two United reps that had I waited in line I would not have flown out until Monday, all the flights to Tucson were booked up.
My complaint here, United Airlines did not have a plan, they had no idea how to handle this situation. There were 3 other services counters available. Why not split up flights, amongst counters, instead send all to one. Why not inform people in line, tell them what was happening? Why offer some courtesy beverage to make things more comfortable? Take care of the customer..in this case this was not done. Yes, some people got serviced, if they were in the front of the line. The rest of us stood in line and waited, and waited.
Where was the plan, where was the service? You cannot tell me that this has never happened before and that there was no idea how to handle it. United Airlines customer service in this instance did not exist.
Posted by: Sketor | October 19, 2006 11:21 AM | Permalink to Comment