United Airlines

Sooooo... here I am in DEN airport. It was supposed to be a quick 50min connection to my Regina flight. We get there to hear the dreaded announcement, "We are looking for two volunteers to give up their seats to this flight and hopefully to get on the 7:30 flight to Regina, or else 10am Sunday morning."

Lauren and I were actually pondering it, because they were offering $400 each for future travel, plus if we stayed overnight, we'd get a free hotel also. But we decided, nahh, we'd rather just get home ASAP. I have hockey that I am dying to play, and we miss our bed and cats. Then I notice my name on the board... so I walk up. They say, "you are currently on the involuntary bumped list, so if everyone shows up, you will be involuntarily denied boarding to the plane".

K, sounds like fun! When's the next flight? Oh, just at 7pm. Not so bad, I miss some hockey, miss some Leafs, but not too inconvenient, and we get $400 vouchers each, no food vouchers though. I figure Lauren can go, and I'll chill here and play poker while Lauren gets to go home and get the house and stuff in order. Instead, we get up there, and there's this other girl wiping away tears because she was also denied entry. Lauren decided that the best thing to do would be to stay here with me, get another $400 travel money, and let this crying girl have her flight. So we did.

Then we go to customer service, here's the quick story:

Flight tonight, not available.
Flight tomorrow, now available.
Flight Thursday, they can book us in.
Supervisor comes, says that lady is crazy, she argues with Lauren voraciously for about 45 minutes, then I come up to the counter and say, "You know, it would make sense to ME that we'd just get the next flight to Regina, guaranteed, and you can bump someone else to tomorrow mornin
She says, that's not how it works, they all have guaranteed seats, we can't bump them.
Lauren snaps, because obviously WE had paid fares also. So this supervisor calls some people, then says she's getting us home on the 7:15 tonight. I ask how she did it, she said, "oh, there was just a cancellation."
Then as we are leaving, she says "just in case there are too many people booked for this flight, too, get there to the gate early"

Hahaha.... so she CLEARLY just put us on the next plane, threw caution to the wind, knowing that her shift would be over by the time that someone else had to deal with the next angry couple that got bumped. It seems to me that the overall best thing for the company both financially and customer oriented is to not put your customers in these situations.

On a side note, I find it funny how casually they just say, "We can get you a flight on Thursday night? How's that for you?" ........ It's Saturday afternoon. What fucking world do you live in where that's "okay" for me???????? It's not like I have a job or anything.