How to Defeat United Airlines' Kiosk Lies

We had a flight today going from LaGuardia to New Orleans, with a connection in Chicago. Upon our check-in, we were told that the flight had been delayed and I would miss my connection. The only available flight was one that connected in Denver, and took 11 hours to complete. A glance at the agent counter revealed an unmoving line full of frowny faces in the same situation as ourselves. So as to not get completely stranded, we accepted the Denver tickets and made our way back home. Of course, a simple Orbitz search showed many other United flights with much less Sisyphean connections. Changing our flight to one with a short layover in Philly, Charlotte, or DC should be taken care of by a simple phone call, right? Well, it did just take a phone call, but it was far from simple.


United Airlines customer service will do the right thing if you are persistent, but will throw many obstacles in your way to try to make you give up. The first obstacle is phone tree in which it difficult to talk to an actual person. It said the confirmation number we entered was incorrect and finally put us through to somebody.

The biggest obstacle is the first level of customer service, which tries very hard to get you to give up, and may actually not have any real authority whatsoever. For our situation, we were told that we couldn't change the tickets since we already accepted the Denver ones, and that even if we were to talk to a supervisor we would be told the same thing. We replied that they are perfectly able to cancel the Denver tickets and change them to any one of four United flights we listed. We only took the Denver tickets because the kiosk said it was the only available flight; since this was dishonest, we wanted to change them to a flight that didn't involve traversing the fucking intercontinental divide. If this agent was not authorized to make this change, we would like to speak to a supervisor who could.

Then we were transferred to a supervisor who simply changed the flight. It would have been easy to give up after the first denial -- but the 5 hours of our life we just got back makes the gymnastics very much worth it. If you are dealing with United, you should keep in mind that the first level of customer service is just there to try to make you give up. Have confidence that you are right, and come informed with the flight numbers of alternative connections so that they can not continue the kiosk lies.