I’ve just been reminded why I stopped flying to the US some four years ago. Booking flights is (mostly) painful. Legacy airlines are in need of a strong dose of process angioplasty, if not a customer comms heart transplant.
In theory I’m a United frequent flyer, except I’m not anymore since they nuked my account. Fair enough. I’ve not flown with them for more than 3 years and they do reserve the right to wipe out my air miles. But. They don’t answer email, their Mileage Plus site is broken and even if I could have used my non-existent airmiles, it’s not possible for my class of Mileage Plus user or on the dates I want unless I fancy taking a tour of the US to get to San Francisco.
No wonder they’ve been in bankruptcy. United doesn’t care enough about customers any longer. Which is a shame because in the period 1997-2001, I stuck with them. They were great at the time though I know many who hated them.
Continental tries but fails. I attempted to book online three times before giving up and making a POTS call that lasted 12 minutes. Entering credit card details brought up a screen telling me my reservation details would be forwarded by email. Didn’t happen. 24 hours later and the Continental reservation I thought I’d made had vanished but no error message received when I entered the reservation code.
I may get a seat with laptop power on the inbound flight but that depends on whether the ‘system’ holds me to the seat I’ve requested. On the outbound, a lot depends on whether I can book the laptop powered seat online closer to departure time. At least Cheryl at the Continental call centre was pleasant and helpful. That was a blessing.
Booking the separate Granada>Madrid leg took 1 minute. If I was flying around Europe with Easyjet (less rapacious than RyanAir which charges for everything it can think of), the process would have been really smooth.
Anyone know if Newark airport is an interesting place? Apparently I’ll be hanging around there for a few hours on both legs. Looking at the map and facilities thingy, it all looks same old, same old.
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