How United Airlines Lost a Million-Mile Flier

My two longest loyal business alliances have been Hertz rental cars and United Airlines. Today the list dwindles to one, Hertz the lone survivor. Hertz treats me just as special now as my first rental three decades ago.

Yesterday, for the umpteenth time, United was less than zero help when I sought human help planning a long dreamed of “bucket list” trip.

I am a 1K flier with United—which means I flew more than 100,000 miles last year—plus I have flown 1.5 million miles with them during my business career. For the 1K status I get ten free drink coupons and “special” service. The drink coupons are a fact. The rest is fiction unless we argue the definition of ‘special.’

Last year, 2012, United cancelled seven flights on me, including a stretch where I was stranded three times in four segments. They hung me out to dry from coast-to-coast and in-between, plus in Istanbul, Turkey during the Christmas holidays. Virtually all cancellations were due to mechanicals or unavailable aircraft.

When cancelled, you are stranded. The airline re-books at its discretion, usually at ungodly hours on a circuitous route wedged in a terrible seat. You, the customer, pay every interim expense that might arise: extra hotel nights, meals, taxis and rental cars, extra parking at your home airport, extra dog kennel money, phone and internet bills–pretty much everything connected with reshuffling the disruption they caused to your schedule.

It ain’t cheap. Cancellations are a pain in the butt and wallet.

In this age of instant technology, if asked United will notify you of a cancellation electronically ahead of time–before you go to the airport. But somehow they are incapable of uploading hotel and expense credits to customer portfolios. If you are cancelled and want United to issue you a hotel or food voucher, you must travel to the airport to get them—on your time and your dime, of course—and secure them in person from an airline representative. Even so, you will end up at a place you didn’t choose eating on a minimum wage allowance.

This reimbursement avoidance ruse is United’s version of the pulled-hamstring trick. They don’t handle hotel and meal vouchers electronically not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to. They want to save their money and shove that cost back onto their customers. Such chicanery is blatantly insulting.

Last year I estimated these interrelated expenses cost me an extra $600 per cancellation. Since I work for myself, that $600 is after-tax, take-home pay. Do the math for seven cancellations. In basic terms I need to earmark $5,000 in personal gross earnings just to cover United’s incompetence and arrogant largesse.

Since United has no complaint department—not so much as an address or phone number—last summer I went online and identified a senior vice-president in its Chicago headquarters. I wrote and mailed a handwritten letter of concern. Two weeks later I received a canned reply from someone delegated to clean up such intrusions, along with the happy news that 10,000 bonus miles had been deposited into my mileage account.

As airlines consolidate and more seats are taken out of the sky, prices go up and service declines. Fewer routes mean fewer options, which means less traveler flexibility and greater load capacities, which is good for the airlines because the industry shifts from a traveler’s advantage into a stronger seller’s market. Revenues per seat increase.

As per-seat revenues grow, fewer discounted and free seats remain. Although United makes a big deal out of its loyalty programs, UAL is now under legal attack by a fellow like me—a million-mile flier who is sick of being hosed by diminished value client loyalty because long-term business histories fall into new CEO Jeff Smisek’s propwash of unconcern. I applaud this litigation. The petitioner represents the angry voice of thousands, including me.

Smisek replaced Glenn Tilton in 2010 as CEO, winning the political arm-wrestling contest in the United-Continental merger. He is a Continental guy, not a United guy, book-smart with a Harvard law degree. Since becoming CEO Smisek has excelled at two things:

1. Starring in vanity videos that are mocked by travelers and employees but jammed down travelers’ throats prior to every takeoff.
2. Cutting cost (and consequently services) out of the brand. Morale is so bad Sherlock Holmes and Watson could work overtime and not find a happy employee. When employees are not happy, they do not care. When they do not care, they disengage. When they disengage in a service-reliant industry, the result is terrible service. The first to notice are those who fly the most. Guys like me, for example.

Ergo Smisek’s conundrum. Road warriors with extensive travel experience and/or a far longer history with the United brand and culture all wonder the same thing: “What the hell is he doing?”

I digress. Let’s return to my world with United—my bucket list pursuit.

A road warrior’s life is not for everyone but it fits for some and I am one. Stuff goes wrong and time is forever lost but both are occupational hazards that go with the territory. Through the years I have learned to handle these grenades fairly well and create far fewer incidents than I used to. Time is practicality’s Novocaine when it comes to uncontrollable inconvenience.

Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to plan what I thought would be a straightforward trip to southern Africa. Since flying there involves about 24 hours’ air time, the goal was simple: avoid flying coach and avoid paying full business class fares.

After several fruitless hours wrestling with United’s dreadfully primitive website, I dialed the number on the back of my special plastic ID card and called my exclusive million-miler, 1K phone representative for help. I rarely do this—I am proudly self-sufficient, resilient and low maintenance—but I did so yesterday armed with these tools:

• Money and a willingness to spend it.
• Global upgrade certificates (6).
• 160,000 frequent flier miles.

Alas, these implements were not nearly enough. The reservations agent I spoke knew less than me about routes, regs, restrictions, and partners. She also didn’t care and referred me to United’s website. My request for help was parried. My call seemed an intrusive inconvenience.

For those mulling a trip on United to South Africa, let me spare you a gunshot’s worth of pain: Go elsewhere. A million+ miles and 1K status aren’t worth two dead cats to United. Nor is a practical combination of money, global upgrades, and 160,000 miles to burn on upgrades. You will have better luck teaching an elephant to skip rope.

Here’s why:

• Although you accumulate miles a variety of ways, the flights you take to accumulate those miles are ineligible for use because of the straightjacket conditions surrounding United’s restrictive, conditional upgrades.
• You must pay at least 2X the cost of a regular coach seat in order to be eligible to ask to use your upgrades. If you gamble and pay that premium, you will not know whether you are screwed or upgraded until a few days before leaving—which means if you aren’t upgraded it is too late to book any cost-effective alternative. There in coach you will sit, next to some schlub who paid half what you did despite having zero “special status” with the airline.

My most direct semi-upgradeable option from Denver to Johannesburg boiled down to:

• Fly from the USA to Lagos, Nigeria—a true garden spot—wait eight hours, and connect for the final six-hour leg to Johannesburg with United’s Star Alliance “partner” South African Airways. The Lagos strategy was a gambling hope. It meant paying the double coach fare, plus burning a global upgrade without even the guarantee of an upgrade across the Atlantic.

But here the plot thickens. United’s summer flights to Lagos are booking the 787 Dreamliner, which is grounded by the FAA with no guarantee when it will return to the sky. This means I would have to pay United all that money up front, commit the upgrade, and still risk having the flight cancelled. If the 787 weren’t flying but United wanted to fly the route, they would substitute an alternative long-haul aircraft with a different configuration of seats.

Plane substitutions cause traveler seating reassignment, which often bumps travelers from business class to coach class—even those previously assigned and holding a business class seat assignment.

I know this because United has done this to me on international long haul flights before, too. Twice.

Experience loudly banged pots and pans in my head, warning that the Lagos route was a sucker play with a high chance of failure. It is one thing to be stranded in Istanbul, the world’s second largest city, or Dubai, like Baku one the world’s newest. It is quite another to be kicked to the curb in Nigeria.

I passed.

I examined other options, among them Dubai, which I love. From there I’d connect to Joburg. Same fire drill as Lagos, although Dubai holds a warm and special distinction for me in United’s Hall of Inept Fame: It is the only destination where I was cancelled both ways, first trying to get there and again trying to fly home. Jumbo jets, 777s. Go figure.

On that trip I was forced to collect my luggage and fend for myself at 1 AM going over and 2 AM coming back. The ticket was on a customer’s dime, $15,000 worth. Every other expense I was forced to eat as mine.

In Dubai it took more than four hours for my luggage to be unloaded from the belly of a plane that never left the gate. I straggled out of the airport at sunrise, bags in hand with nowhere to go. It was surreal.

Another option I considered was flying Dulles to Istanbul and connecting there. Same financial gambit: Pay 2X-2.5X premium over nonrefundable coach and then role the dice on a potential upgrade. Or I could pay 8X coach and be guaranteed a seat. When I looked at the flight’s available seating, business class was wide open. Not a seat was taken.

That data point, unfortunately, is irrelevant. Global system upgrades sound nice but are basically worthless since United will decide four days before departure who is upgraded and who is not. They do not print that on your special 1K million-miler plastic card.

Since connecting flights from Dubai or Istanbul still required Star Alliance “partners” which do not honor United upgrade policies or recognizes its 1K status, I would still be stuck in coach for eight or ten hours. Too many.

I even looked at London. Another dead end. Every bad option made me feel more and more like a mime trapped in a box.

Especially frustrating is that I love all those cities. Stranded in any of them is better than Lagos. Heck, Gilligan’s Island is better than Lagos.

After my frustrating no-help phone experience, I took a break and thought about United’s entire body-of-work, a mushrooming monument to clusterfudge: a massive waste of time that created a huge amount of negative energy.

I value my time and am a positive guy who polices his thoughts to stay that way. After thinking about all the various fish United slapped my face with over the last few years, I drew the obvious but overdue conclusion: If the airline could not or would not meet my needs, it was time to quit pretending they could. It was time to fly with somewhere else.

So I did. I booked eight flights on another carrier in the around same amount of time I wasted on the United 1K Bat-phone with a morose, unhelpful representative.

Now I will fly when, where, and how I want. Better yet, I saved enough money to cover the cost of a wilderness safari. Plus I don’t have to watch one of Smisek’s banal videos telling me, rather than showing me, how much he values my business.

Words are cheap but actions have power, especially in service industries.

Today’s frequent travelers are savvy. Road warriors know that United is long on words and short on actions. They, like me, also realize that United is bankrupt on customer goodwill and loyalty.

Yesterday’s competitive buying experience was, by contrast, a hundred times more efficiently pleasant than the unexpected root canal that came from calling United to seek help but getting none. And it was light years more enjoyable than UAL’s computerized phone calls, maddening voice sometimes-recognition software, and the airline’s pervasive “We don’t care” attitude.

I wish someone other than Donald Trump had coined the phrase, but in closing I borrow it: “United, you’re fired.”

There. I said it. I feel better already.