Where has customer service gone? Not to United!

For those in the know, you may know I'm in Japan.  For those not in that category, now you know.  Now that we've got that out of the way, I'd like to write about my trip here.

To begin, a context enlightening preamble.  My mother-in-law, who is awesome, stays with us for extended periods of time (months in a row) and it is a huge help.  She's fantastic to have around the house, and the kids love her.  Our trip to Japan coincides with a return visit for her, so we'll all be catching the same flight back to the US.  That will make the 15 hours of travel easier. Having another adult to man the kids is very good thing.

She asks me to book her flight, and I happily oblige.  I create the itinerary on United.com and get the thumbs up, and then attempt to buy it.  This works fine, up to the payment page when it doesn't allow me to enter a Japanese billing address.  There isn't clear messaging on this site, but after a couple clicks I figure out that I have to go to United Japan's website.

Excellent, I think, as I login and pull up her saved itinerary.  I click through to purchase it, and it simply errors out with some helpful messaging you might find on a 404 Not Found page (such as updating bookmarks).  I'm assuming this is because their programmers just don't care about their job, because handling errors is generally simple.

I recreate the itinerary, or so I thought.  I picked the wrong flight (fortunately for us, on her return to Japan) that had her out far too early to catch the SFO connection.

I figure that a quick call to United to explain the situation, and also to request the bassinet available to us, will get everything in order.

This is where United gets even worse.

First, the wretched and unhelpful woman on the phone apparently put the request for the bassinet in a drawer, then set the desk on fire.  Nobody had any idea what so ever about a bassinet request or anything else to assist us.  Fantastic.  Fortunately, the flight attendants (well, the Japanese) were very helpful in getting us situated.  On the flight, they bumped a woman at the bulkhead to business and setup my wife and baby there with the bassinet.  I'm very happy about this, which helped alleviate the frustration about the phone jockey.

The frustration which was hugely amplified by her unapologetic lack of care about the United.com dying on purchasing, and my subsequent struggles trying to change the flight to the intended purchase.  She simply informed me that it would be around $250 (I think $282, I wasn't really paying attention to the number) to change the ticket.  I told her that was ridiculous, as I could buy a round-trip ticket just for that leg for much cheaper (since I do the PDX-SFO flight on occasion, I know that I can buy it for $150 on sale and $200 regularly.)

Her response: If you do that, you cannot continue your trip unless you board the original flight.

Go United!  This is how you keep customers, fo' sure!  I think I'll be recommending the NWA direct PDX to NRT flight, since it is around the same price (for PDX to KIX).

This trip has also exposed me to the privilege of watching two other stewardflight attendants snap angrily at passengers.  One instance was because the woman put discarded chewing gum in the bottom of a plastic cup.  Seriously.

Airlines aren't losing money because of the economy, or security concerns.  They're losing money because they treat their passengers like cattle.  A smile and friendly service can make any seat feel like business class.

I don't think I'll be flying United anymore, perhaps a time or two more to use up my miles.