&*%# United Airlines

I really, really looked just now for a symbol of a woman strangling herself, because this, would be me, after three steady hours on the phone with various airlines; this, after a similar amount of time spent last Friday. Come with me, if you will, to the land where accumulated miles are not... what they seem.

"Hi, I need to get from Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas on June first, returning the third. I'm very flexible as to time."

"We don't fly directly..."

"Yes, I know, but I don't care where I connect through: San Jose, SF, LA, Dallas, Denver, Pheonix. Sri Lanka, Cassiopeia..."

"Why, yes; there are 468 ways we can get you to Austin on the first. Let's see [click click tap tap...] How about blahbity blah?"

"That's perfect. I'd like to use my miles to pay for this."

Silence.

"Hello?"

"I'm sorry. That fare is not eligible with miles."

"Oh, um, well, what can you get me?"

Much furious tapping, finally, "There's only one flight available..."

"One?! What happened to the other 466?"

"They're not eligible with miles. But I have something here that puts you in at bleble, and gets you back into Portland at 2:05 AM."

"Well, okay..."

Tapping tapping tapping... "Why isn't it letting me..." Tap tap tap... "Oh, sorry, I can't get you that fare."

"What do you mean?"

"It's with a partner airline that's not a partner of ours."

???

"Sorry."

"So, you're saying you cannot take me, in any way, to Austin. Why?"

"Because there are only so many tickets reserved for the mileage plan."

"What, like, two?"

"No, thirty or forty. Or fifty."

"You're telling me that fifty people from Portland need to get to Austin on every one of your 468 flights..."

Silence. "You can call customer service."

It's Friday afternoon. I call. It's closed until Monday. For fun, I try to use my miles to:

• Fly to Boston in July
• To New York in September
• To LA in June

I do this with a 31-day flexibility, and the ONLY flight available, is one ticket to New York in late September, and it's First Class.

I call customer service on Monday. After waiting for ten minutes, a woman in India answers, asks me three times for my phone number, says she's very sorry but she is not the person I need to talk to; that I need to call reservations. I tell her, they told me to call her. She says, oh, well, makes some fake tapping noises with her pencil, and says she'll report it to the appropriate person. I tell her, she knows this is a lie, that she's never going to do anything with it, and then I call customer service and get Margie in Atlanta and ask her, is it all a scam?

"Well," she wants to know, "why did you cancel that flight we booked for you to Austin?"

Agh! I didn't cancel it! You did! You're not partnered with that airline!

"Well," she drawls again, "what do you want me to do about it?"

How about, honoring what you say you're going to do about it? No wonder your airline is in the gd toilet.

Contrast this with Cape Air, where you call, you book, you make jokes, where they get it.

PS: Reader Tomi left a clear, thorough and informative comment as to the airline industry's ever-burdened/ever-shrinking availability of FF seats that is worth reading.

Comments

[david]

Oh my. Sigh. This is the nightmare many of us mile-savers have woken to. Now, I'm no expert, but the way I understand it, the airlines allocate some seats for pure mileage buyer. Maybe three or four. Then they do the same for ticket buyers who want to upgrade. If you want seats you have to book 4-6 months in advance on well-traveled flights. It used to be that there were blackout periods during which you couldn't use miles -- typically the most popular times like holidays. Now blackouts are rare, but allocated seats are even more rare. You can get put on a waiting list sometimes and get seats at the last minute when the people who reserved the seats with mileage six months earlier let them go.

Traveling to Europe, it was a miracle to get mileage seats to London, and the goddamned second coming if you could get the non-stop flight from LAX to Heathrow without having to go backwards three steps to get ahead four. Okay, I exaggerate, but the whole system sucks. Too many miles and programs, not enough seats, too expensive fuel.

there are, however, so great websites that educate you about this; www.flyertalk.com is one. Seatguru.com will help with seating selection, if you can get one.

Considering all the time you spend on the phone with pissed off low wage workers, bicycling is faster.

[Food Dude]

KGW did a story about this a month ago. They actually rated which airlines have the easiest policy to deal with. All I remember is Alaska was one of the best.

KGW had the same problem, being told flights 3-4 months from now were booked. Apparently, only 1-2 seats a flight are allocated to frequent flyers.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Nancy

Good posting and a lot of us here who can share in your despair.

A few notes of possible interest. First, its not only the United frequent fliers who are eating up those few precious allocated seats, its also the partner airlines on the alliance (United is Star Alliance). So you might have a Singapore Airlines (also Star Alliance) passenger on frequent flier miles en route from Singapore to Austin, and happens to be booked via a route including a leg from Los Angeles to Austin. That eats up one of the few frequent flier seats on that LA-Austin flight. If your travel agent had attempted to book you on a Portland-LA-Austin flight, now this Singapore Airlines passenger had used up one of the allocated seats.

It of course cuts both ways. You can for example book your European trip and fly say Lufthansa from New York to Frankfurt - but again with the hope that you can find an available seat. My point being, its not only your fellow United frequent fliers but in fact anyone wanting to make "any connection" possible to reach your destination. I once flew from Santiago Chile to Sydney Australia, not the straight route across the South Pacific, nor island-hopping along Nauru and Tahiti, but all the way around the biggest ocean in the world, via Los Angeles (in fact Santiago-Miami-Dallas-LA) and Tokyo and then down to Sydney. Spent 40 hours in planes to complete that journey just because it was the only connection on frequent flier seats to get me from Chile to Australia...

Another point. Already earned frequent flier miles are an enormous iceberg in terms of their potential economic value. The Economist estimated I think about two years ago, that if all accrued miles were converted into cash at their typical value per mile, they would be worth more than the TOTAL of ALL CASH in circulation!! (not more than all money, as we have credit cards, checks, bank balances etc, but of all actual cash in circulation).

So even before we get ever higher prices of oil (and more price penalties to airlines struggling with profits), and even before some more airlines go under (partly due to bad management, partly due to price wars, partly due to over-extended national subsidies) - and these will no doubt cut out some more of those most-wanted seats - note that in the future it will become EVER MORE problematic to find ANY usable flights that you could use your miles for.

There are increasingly more fliers who have reached usable levels of miles, and/or who decide to "cash in" their mileage banks, to convert into flights. More demand. Yet airlines keep restricting the actual available flights (seats per flight, and in some cases eligible flights themselves, such as miles not covered on all subsidiaries of a given airline group). That means that the fast and clever ones will capture the meaningful and useful flights. Some others who want to fly at any cost, anywhere, just for the sheer heck of it, will eat up most of the remaining flights.

We will approach soon the situation that for any practical flight idea, within a 12 month period, you won't find a flight. And then it will start to extend into 24 months, and so forth.

What is my recommendation? Burn your miles now, while you can still get good value from them. Had the plan to go to Europe or the Far East or whatever was your fancy? Book it now. Can't get August or September? Book now for November or January (don't bother with Christmas time)

And the other thing, if you feel so inclined, is to use the points for upgrades. Buy the eligible tourist class ticket and fly business class eg long-haul. Just make sure those seats are available before you buy....

Its not going to get easier. All airlines are constantly watching their bottom lines, and they know they cannot afford to give all the "earned" flights to all of their passengers. Then their best bets are to hope they can push passengers onto those flights that are "unpopular" or make very cumbersome connections (on flights that are not in high demand) or book far in advance or - best for them - to keep stalling.

So burn your miles now ha-ha....

PS I'm not an expert in air travel, just happen to fly a lot and am curious about these things. My competence is around mobile phones...

Tomi Ahonen :-)
website www.tomiahonen.com
blogsite www.communities-dominate.blogs.com

[nancy]

Thanks, Tomi; you may think you're not an expert, but I think you are.
As for actually using those miles: I have more than 50,000 on United/Alliance Star; Din (my husband) has at least as many on Amex, and we want to get to Panama next April. I'm booking now.

[Zev]

It's b/c of stuff like this that instead of credit cards that give miles, I use only cashback cards. I'd rather get 1% of my money back guaranteed than miles I may never be able to use. And there are some cards now that give you as much as 5% back on some types of purchases.

[Alex]

This is dreadful. I hate it when companies do this sort of thing. It is an inspiration to me never to allow that sort of thing at my business.

[BunterMedic]

Hi all!
Where find bad girls?
G'night