Quote:Not to belabor this, but here's my story with my TSA/Global Entry/Gold Elite boarding pass status and "X's" name in the text:
I am not given to publishing epistles on Facebook, and especially at Christmas, but now I have my very own United Airlines story to share:

Not feeling sufficiently cowed by the media debacle following its forcible and well-documented removal of a ticketed passenger from a Kentucky bound flight in April, the friendly skies of United continues to treat passengers badly, and to lie. This time, it involved United flight #788 from Houston’s Bush International Airport to Reagan National in Washington DC on December 18, 2017. And Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). And me.

On December 3, 2017, I purchased a round trip, first class ticket to Guatemala. I selected four first class seats at time of purchase. United provided an email confirmation with a receipt and the four seat designations. Everything was fine until I returned to Houston yesterday.

After flying up from Guatemala to Houston, the last segment was flight #788 from Bush International to DC. Because the flight departure time was delayed for a late incoming aircraft from Guadalajara, I spent two hours in the United lounge in Terminal E. I was at Gate E4 an hour before departure. About 30 minutes before takeoff, a uniformed United flight attendant pulled Ms. Jackson Lee from priority boarding Line 1. They were a couple feet from me, and I heard the United flight attendant tell Jackson Lee, “Let’s get on.”

The United attendant and Jackson Lee boarded the plane first, including before the pre-boarding of uniformed military, toddlers, people with disabilities and Global Services passengers, and even a group of fellow Texas congressmen whom Jackson Lee had been talking to before she was escorted onto the plane. Line 1 boarded, but when they scanned my ticket, my seat and my reservation had been removed from the system. The gate agent could not find my seat; she could not even find my ticket or my name. She tried for several minutes to pull up my reservation, but I had been wiped from the system. The gate agent called over a second United agent who confirmed that I had no seat, not just the first class seat I had purchased, but no seat, period. I didn’t even have a reservation anymore.

The second agent asked the other agent if I was late coming in from another flight or another airline. The first agent told him no, that I had been on United, that my first segment had arrived three hours earlier, and that I had been at the gate. Then the second agent told me that perhaps I had cancelled my own reservation. I said that was impossible: I had a boarding ticket in hand and I just wanted to get home. Then he told me that “united.com has changed your reservation” and there was nothing United could do about it.

I said I wanted my seat, that I had paid a lot of miles for that seat, and that it was United’s responsibility to undo the seat assignment and return it to me, the person who had paid for it. He said no, because I had “unreserved” my seat and it had been given to another passenger, that s/he had been “upgraded.” He said I could “stand here and argue” and miss the flight or book another flight with another airline, meaning that I would lose my first class ticket and pay for a second one. I said I wanted my seat, 1A, that I had paid for and selected in early December and one that the upgraded passenger in 1A was now freeloading, literally at my expense. He said that couldn’t happen because they couldn’t “disrupt” what was already done. He offered me a $300 voucher. I said I wanted $500 and a free meal. He said, “And I want a Mercedes Benz, but that’s not going to happen.” Then he invited me to complete a United online survey when the flight was over.

The first agent went into the United reservations system and told me that one hour and twenty minutes earlier, my seat had been re-assigned. That means that at about 11:20am, a United employee went into the system, eliminated my 1A seat designation, and re-assigned it to Jackson Lee.
I was the last passenger on the plane. A Texas congressman, a nice guy, sat down next to me. He said was glad I had made it on the flight. I showed him my boarding pass with my seat, 1A, printed on it. He said, “You know what happened, right? Do you know who’s in your seat?” I said no. He told me that it was Jackson Lee, a fellow U.S. congresswoman who regularly does this, that this was the third time he personally had watched her bump a passenger. Then he asked me if I knew whom Jackson Lee represents in Congress: Bush International Airport in Houston. He apologized, saying, “Jackson Lee gives us all a bad name; it’s shameful.”

The hydraulic pump on the flight wasn’t working, so after 50 minutes stalled at the gate, passengers were invited to consult with a gate agent at the front of the plane about alternative flights. I went to the front, where Jackson Lee was in my seat. I took a picture. I told a flight attendant, the one who had pre-boarded Jackson Lee that I knew why I had been bumped.

Five minutes later, a flight attendant sat down next to me and asked if I was going to be a “problem” on the flight. I asked if she heard me shouting or complaining. She said no, but I had taken a photo. (Taking photos is not illegal: if I had been a happy constituent of Jackson Lee and had asked to take a photo with Jackson Lee, she would happily have complied.) The flight attendant said that security would remove me from the plane if I “created problems.” I said I just wanted to get home. I said to her, to paraphrase, “Why should someone get a seat I paid for?” She responded that the person had Global Services status. In fact, Jackson Lee boarded even before Global Services was invited to board, not to mention that the first class seat was mine regardless of Jackson Lee’s priority status.

The flight attendant went back to the front of the cabin and I spent the next five minutes wondering if I was going to be escorted off the plane by an armed security guard. The flight took off and landed late at Reagan National in DC.
United lied to me, repeatedly. They put Jackson Lee on the plane and then tried to blame it on a late incoming flight, another airline, my cell phone, united.com, Global Services, and on everybody but the United employee who deliberately erased my seat, my ticket, and my name from the system in order to accommodate a member of Congress who repeatedly bullies his/her way into favored status.

United has some wonderful employees, like the gate agents at Reagan National and some flight attendants who, if there’s a war, I want on my side. But unfortunately, what one most remembers is the humiliation and expense wrought by United, who apparently believes that we all should be lucky to be flying the friendly skies with an airline that treats the paying public like dirt.