This site exists only because of the airline's outright hostility toward its passengers and many of its employees.
Don't show this message again
I understand
No, leave this page
Note that I don't normally post the message path of e-mail I
receive, but if you read this and the following
letter, not only will you notice some striking similarites in the
content, but you'll also see an identical originator (in red).
In short, if you're going to flame twice and pretend it came from
different people, at least make a small effort to conceal the obvious!
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Initial letter:
From creative.net!je2fly Wed Sep 11 16:58:31 1996
Dear Jeremy R. Cooperstock and Vinita N. D'Souza, As an airline employee I was interested in your complaint letter posted on the web. After reading the documents that you posted on the Web I found myself compelled to respond. I am writing this letter to you as an advisory travel-aid so that you may prevent any further complications in your future travels WITH ANY AIRLINE. First, I would like to point out your first error. In your initial letter you mentioned that you arrived at the check-in line 45 minutes before departure. In the future, when traveling on an International flight, you would benefit by arriving at the airport two hours before departure AS ALL INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES REQUIRE. A Forty-Five minute wait is a very average wait time for even some busy domestic routes, and is very good for international flights. Secondly, you expressed disatisfaction towards United Airlines because you felt they only made an announcement in CHINESE. I would like to point out that any time an announcement is made at any airort in the world, it will be made in the origin countries language regardless of any other language that the announcemnet was broadcast in. Your mention of the announcement in Chinese expresses to me your ignorance and further tells me that you jump to immediate conclusions without any pursuit of fact. The announcement was most likely made in Japanese as the flights Final destination was Japan. Canada (as I am sure you are aware) is comprised mainly of English speaking and French speaking citizens. Therefore, the announcement was most definitely made in ENGLISH and most likely French, Both languages you failed to recognize or aknowledge. Your third mistake describes a common one made by persons who rarely travel. You mentioned in your letter that the agent failed to notify the gate of your intention to travel. Sir, this signifies to me that you have no regard for your fellow traveller. You expected the airline to hold and thus delay your flight for you. How can you expect an airline to maintain an on-time performance when it holds its flights for passengers who lack in planning. You would have a flight of approximately Two-Hundred passengers be inconvenienced because YOU failed to arrive on time at the airport and YOU failed to recognize an announcement made in ENGLISH. I will not fail to point out mistakes made by the airline employees. I feel that the airline employee made a bad judgment by sending you to Air Canada. You should have been rebooked at United Airlines at your first point of contact (Check-In). You should be aware that if the flight you were originally booked on was the ONLY flight that would make it to your conncetion, then the gate agent would have no choice in sending you to another airline. You would have to travel another day if you missed your connection... You mentioned that the Air Canada agent miraculously changed your itinerary to an Air Canada flight. I will tell you that the only way the agent could have done this was with an authorization from United Airlines. I am sure that after some research, the Air Canada agent found this authorization in the computer he/she was using. On your return trip you repeated your very first mistkae. Tthe same mistake that I feel initialized your travel problems. You failed to check in for an international flight two hours before departure... again. (Please note: International flights are still internatinal when they must make stop-overs). Further, Your reserved seats are given away if you do not check in on time. Reserved seats are not held until the last minute. In most markets, statistics show that Twenty percent of passengers with reservations will NO-SHOW for a flight. This means that Twenty Percent of an aircrafts seats would be left empty if they were not given away to other passengers who stand-by for seats. I will not make excuses for your wool suits damage, EXCEPT for the fact that "stowed baggage may shift during flight" (have you ever heard this announcement made by the flight attendants or did they only speak CHINESE?). This may be the reason for your misfortune. The compensation certificate you received is probably an attempt on the airlines part to satisfy a customer who may have been inconvenienced but cannot afford satisfactory proof. Passengers sometimes feel that a letter will afford them a free ticket to travel on the airline they complain to. If the airlines did this, everyone (including myself) would write letters to the airlines. I would not expect you to receive anything more than a certificate. I respect your attempt to speak out and attemp to resolve matters which you feel you have been wronged. In any case, I thought you should be made aware of the facts. Sincerely, John |
My reply:
Dear John,
First, I must apologize for the delay in replying to your note. As I
mentioned on the Web pages, we have been rather busy with the move to
Japan, so correspondence has been a low priority.
As for the content of your letter, I should preface my reply by noting
that you made several incorrect assumptions based on your reading of the
initial letter that Ms. D'Souza and I wrote to United Airlines, and
further, asserted several judgements as to our character and
intelligence. For this, we forgive you, since as an airline employee
yourself, it must be tempting to believe that the passengers are to
blame, rather than accepting the possibility that someone in your own
industry could be at fault.
In terms of your mistakes, the first, and perhaps most glaring, is your
claim that we "arrived at the check-in line 45 minutes before departure"
of our flight. If you read our first letter, you will see that we waited
in line for 45 minutes at check-in before the announcement was made. In
fact, we had arrived at the airport two hours before the scheduled flight
departure, knowing full well the airline policies.
You then continue by presuming that general industry guidelines
regarding airport announcements apply universally and are followed
without exception. Unless you were physically present at the check-in
counter with us in Toronto, I fail to understand how you could have heard
the announcement yourself ("the announcement was most definitely made in
ENGLISH and most likely French") and accuse us of "jumping to immediate
conclusions without any pursuit of fact." Might I suggest that the tone
of your letter indicates this is something of which you are guilty?
At any rate, Vinita and I were listening quite carefully, are both
certain that only a single announcement was made (not over the PA system,
but by a tour group representative), and that this announcement was in
Chinese. While I cannot distinguish between Cantonese or Mandarin
dialects and my knowledge of Japanese is quite limited, I can certainly
tell these languages apart, and have no trouble understanding
announcements in either English or French. The large number of Hong
Kong-destined passengers on our scheduled flight to San Francisco was
likely the reason for the announcement made in Chinese. Again, you err
in claiming that the flight's final destination was Japan. Our itinerary
was:
Although our destination was Japan, this is clearly not the case for UA
1105. I do not know why no announcement was made in English or French,
and like you, I found this surprising, which is why we mentioned it in
our letter to United.
Next, after being redirected by the agent, you accuse us of having "no
regard for [our] fellow traveller" because we expected the agent to
notify the gate that we were on our way. You continue, "You expected the
airline to hold and thus delay your flight for you." I'm sorry to dispel
your illusions of our supposed inconsideration, but all we had hoped for
was a reasonable amount of communication to take place between the agent
and the gate to ascertain whether or not we had enough time to make the
flight. If not, then an alternate arrangement could have been made on
the spot with United, rather than having us run from terminal to
terminal.
Moving to our return flight from Honolulu, you fail to recognize that the
flight's destination was Chicago, not Toronto. Our itinerary for this
segment was:
Hence, our flight from Honolulu was a US domestic flight, and according
to instructions printed in our itinerary, we were supposed to arrive at
the airport one hour in advance of our scheduled flight time, which we
did. It was not until Chicago that we were asked to show our passports
for the cross-border flight. Regardless, the statistics you cite do not
excuse the airline from giving away our reserved seats, since we had
arrived at the gate well in advance of seat assignment for the stand-by
passengers.
Your attempt to suggest that "stowed baggage may shift during flight" may
be the reason for the damage to my wool suit would be laughable, if meant
as a joke. I assure you that my garment bag did not end up on the closet
floor with a baby stroller on top of it as a result of "baggage shifting"
during the flight. Thank you, however, for "not making excuses for the
damage." You have an interesting way of not making excuses.
In short, your diatribe of uninformed statements and false assertions of
"the facts," while more befitting a young school child than an airline
employee, is still deserving of a serious reply, which I have attempted
to provide here. Had United Airlines showed the same courtesy to two
paying passengers, who took the time to offer polite, constructive
criticism, I never would have thought of publicizing these events.
Sincerely,
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