Individual Passenger Experiences - Firsthand Accounts

Comments made under this post feature the personal accounts of many of the passengers on UA/CO132. Readers can get a sense of what went wrong on this flight and how an initially pretty standard situation (i.e. a maintenance issue) was completely mismanaged at the passengers' expense.

United could have treated its customers with dignity and courtesy and this group of seasoned and frequent flyers would have accepted the simple delay. All passengers were very patient until things went from bad to worse in terms of United staff's behavior and management of the situation on the second day of the ordeal.

One of the big and equally unnecessary problems was that passengers were afforded only 3 hours or less of sleep while the cabin crew received the available information and was able to sleep much longer. Customers on this flight included small children, pregnant women, and passengers in their eighties. No efforts were made to accommodate more vulnerable passengers.

The handling of this flight and the treatment of customers demonstrate that the integration between United and Continental faces major technical and organizational obstacles and produces disastrous consequences, especially for customers, about 1.5 years after the merger.

In any case, United's policy is apparently to simply ignore requests by passengers to be made whole for expenses and harm directly caused by its merger-related and other operational problems, by its operational decisions, and its employee's behavior.