Sunday, January 5, 2014

Chicago's having some weather

I do feel bad about the complications that come with winter weather... we've had a few in our neighborhood. I hope everyone's staying warm and safe. Meanwhile, all of the Boston travelers who were scheduled to fly through Chicago today had all legs of their flights canceled due to the inclement weather.  We found out mid day on Saturday, and spent most of the afternoon and evening trying to get through to ANYONE at United. To no avail. VERY frustrating. Yonder was supposed to be heading back to Utah today. 
Five of his winter semester classes are scheduled for Monday. Next winter hopefully we'll remember to schedule in a winter weather travel buffer day. United used some sort of automatic rescheduling program to put Yonder on some new flights. Here's what we found out: He was scheduled to fly on Monday (1/6) afternoon from Chicago to Chicago. The next (first) leg of his flight was rescheduled to Tuesday (1/7) and would have him flying from Boston to Chicago. He felt a little nervous about those arrangements, and the fact that Salt Lake City was no longer even mentioned in his travel plans. EVERY.SINGLE.FLIGHT to Utah on Sunday was suddenly sold out. There were no agents available to help us. The phone kept automatically disconnecting us, citing system problems. Yonder and his dad headed in to the United counter this morning at 5am and waited in line no less than FOUR HOURS to speak to an agent.  They had ONE agent available to handle any cancellations. I'm hoping he's on his way to Denver as I write this--at which point he'll be on stand-by for a flight to SLC tonight, and guaranteed a seat on a 6:00 am flight on Monday morning.  He might not make all of his classes tomorrow.
We might not fly United again.
At least not in the winter.

3 comments:

ellen said...

Chicago to Chicago? Nice.

Sherry said...

I had a horrible experience flying United once. But I still will pretty much always go with the cheapest tickets.

If Yonder needs a ride from the airport at such an early hour, let me know. He would probably like nothing more than to be picked up at the airport (at some early hour after staying up all night long) by a woman who is a complete stranger to him along with two little boys in the back seat. So yeah, if that's a the top of his list of ways to get back to P-Town, let me know!

shirlgirl said...

Everyone has been having trouble making flights. The kicker today was Jet Blue cancelling all their flights--holy mackerel! One man interviewed has been trying to get home to California for a week. Not good. Hope Yonder got home to Utah o.k.