We were very excited to begin our long awaited journey to Africa and enjoy our much anticipated safari in Botswana, among other activities. Our travel plans were developed in a rather unusual way. We had hoped to cash in United miles to book round trip travel between San Francisco and Johannesburg, South Africa, in business class. Unfortunately, there were no reward options for this itinerary. Due to Rob's inventiveness, however, we were able to book reward travel to Johannesburg in business class with Washington, DC, as the starting and ending point. This meant we needed to travel to Washington, DC, before and at the end of our trip. We purchased this (independent) itinerary, but we arranged to arrive in Washington two days before the flight to Johannesburg. This accomplished two things: (1) we could have a nice visit with our friend Bill MacBlane, and (2) we could ensure that we made it to Washington early to avoid missing our flight to Johannesburg.
On Sunday, April 17, we started our journey with a ride with Napa's Black Tie taxi service to San Francisco's airport. The cab arrived at 8:15 AM, and we arrived very early to the airport for our flight to Washington, DC. Our seats on the airplane were 27B and 27C, which seemed odd to us, since we had thought that we might have purchased Premium Economy class seats, but we weren't really sure since the tickets had been purchased so long ago. During the flight, we overheard the passenger seated in front of us complain to the flight attendant that he had purchased Premium Economy, but was not seated in that section. I decided to launch my United app on the phone and try to discover what we had purchased. I found the original email confirmation and lo and behold, we did purchase Premium seats! We were supposed to have been seated in bulkhead seats 7B and 7C! Well, there was nothing to be done about this on the plane, so we tolerated our seats and the flight went by fairly quickly.
When we landed, however, we immediately spotted United Customer Service agents across from our arrival gate, so we proceeded to talk to them. Our exchange was very unsatisfactory at first with one agent seemingly criticizing us! In the end, a refund of nearly $200 was processed (after being told in error that they couldn't do that). It seemed very unethical to us that United would charge for the Premium seats, then take them away due to an airplane equipment change, and then NOT automatically issue a refund. It is not right that the burden of getting the refund was placed on the consumer.
Baggage claim at Dulles airport took a little while due to some equipment trouble at the carousel, but eventually we got our bags and called our friend Bill, who was waiting in the cell phone lot, to come and pick us up. He picked us up (very nice of him to do so!), and we were off to his townhouse in Alexandria. We received a wonderful welcome from his two beagles, Lucy and Gracie, then enjoyed a few glasses of wine before turning in.
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