Can you trust United?

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

Can You Trust United? - September 2025

Generated image United Airlines always seems to manage lowering how far rock bottom actually goes.

This is a tale of one such incident with United that happened to me this week. The sheer incompetence and indifference this incident shows is too important to ignore. I’ve embedded a lot of screen captures from my mobile phone into this blog so you can see proof that everything I’m saying is true. I apologize for the length, but I need to tell the whole story.

With Southwest Airlines making many negative changes, United is in a heavy push to get people in Denver to switch from Southwest to United. I see three ads a day on my social media feeds with United saying “come change to us because we’re better.” They’ve offered status matches and run ads like the following all the time.

As much as Southwest has proven to be a disappointment, switching to United comes with its own challenges – ones that I would certainly advise against as a United million-miler. (Actually, I just passed 1.5 million miles.)

Most of United’s flights are fine – small delays, minor inconveniences. But when you have to deal with “irrops” (industry slang for irregular operations – when something goes wrong), United clearly has neither the intelligence nor the capacity or desire to handle it well.

This story takes place on a Sunday with me leaving Denver, trying to fly home to Newark on a flight due to depart at 12:44 in the afternoon, and scheduled to land at 6:30pm. The weather in Denver was gorgeous. In the northeast some thunderstorms had just passed a number of hours earlier, so there may have been some spacing issues, but otherwise there were no weather problems.

The night before, as I always do, I checked the status of my flight and the inbound aircraft. The plane was coming from Kona, Hawaii, and it was the Star Alliance livery 757-200 – a plane I’ve been on before (aircraft 3120.)

When I got to the airport, a different aircraft had been assigned – one with the standard United markings. Someone in operations had intentionally assigned my flight a new aircraft, and it was one that happened to need maintenance. My flight was one of many between Denver and Newark that day, all completely full with standbys waiting due to earlier cancellations. Why the ops team decided this route should be the one impacted by a broken plane instead of where it was intended to go, I’ll never know.

The first delay notice came in as I cleared security – My flight would leave one hour late. Then it quickly became two. The notices said there was a technical problem and they were working to fix it. Soon it became three hours. This is standard with United. The delays trickle out – one hour, then two, then three – as if we won’t notice they knew all along it was a serious problem. Easing passengers into bad news in increments is a tactic that’s as disgusting as it is common in the airline industry.

Then came a “good” update: to speed things up, another plane had been found at a different gate, with only a 60-minute delay. The United app showed it, and a text message confirmed it. Everyone rushed to that gate. But instead of showing as departing at 1:45, as promised, it quickly reverted to a 7:46 PM departure – a seven-hour delay.

Passengers tried frantically to get clarity. Which was it – 1:45 or 7:46? Regrettably, there was no one to ask.

That’s when I realized that no one at United works on the secure side of the Denver airport anymore. (That’s an exaggeration, but not by much.) There are no gate agents unless a plane is actively boarding. There are no customer service agents anymore. I called the Premier phone line and the agent admitted they only had the same conflicting information that I did. They’re no longer allowed to check with operations. The agent could have rebooked me, but all flights to Newark that day were full. One had already been canceled. The next available nonstop was the following morning – useless to me.

The app showed the delay was “mechanical” – their fault – but also told me I wasn’t entitled to a meal voucher because the problem was “out of their control.” (You can’t make this stuff up, folks.)

I walked around looking for United personnel. What I found was a QR code on a wall where customer service agents used to be. Scanning it connected me to a remote agent who claimed he was “in Denver but upstairs at a desk” so he could “serve more passengers more quickly.”

He admitted the app was wrong, that the delay was United’s fault, and that I was due meal vouchers, which he sent me a link to claim. (Too late for the money I had already spent of course.) He also sent me a link where I could get a voucher for a hotel stay in case I needed to stay overnight. To his credit, he confirmed the crew for the new 7:45 PM departure would be fresh and not at risk of being timed-out.

Let’s pause here and state the obvious: At their own Denver hub, United had a just flown plane with a mechanical issue they concluded they couldn’t fix in less than seven hours, and the only “replacement” was an aircraft currently delayed due to weather leaving Boston to Newark, and then scheduled for an impossibly short turn-around in Newark to head to Denver. Is that really how they operate at one of their major hubs? Running a fleet like this isn’t just irresponsible, it’s reckless.

That evening the delayed aircraft finally arrived at 7:30 PM Denver time. It needed to be cleaned and serviced before we could board. For reasons only vaguely explained (US Open, UN, who knows?), this flight also required secondary TSA checks – ID matched to boarding passes at the gate. Another slowdown.

We finally completed boarding, and the flight to Newark was generally smooth. We landed at about 2 AM – a nearly 8 hour delay.

You’d think that would be the end of it. But with United, of course not.

The United app told me my checked bag had been sent on an earlier flight and would be waiting for me when I arrived – I should just go to the baggage claim office – so that’s what I did. I went to baggage claim. Of course it wasn’t there.

As it happens, my flight pulled into gate C125. My bag had arrived six and a half hours earlier (7:37pm) on United 597 that went to gate A28. In those six plus hours, United couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t think to get it from Terminal A to Terminal C. When I landed at 2 AM, exhausted after an eight-hour delay and barely functioning, the last thing I or anyone wants to do is to play scavenger hunt for overnight, inter-terminal transportation and missing luggage. I asked them to bring it over to C. They laughed at me and said if I wasn’t willing to get it then it could be delivered to me at home in “four to six hours” or worst case, before noon. That seemed like the only reasonable option.

At that hour no one in my family was awake to pick me up, so I paid for a taxi home.

When I got home, I had an email from United apologizing for the delay and offering $50 in a future flight voucher – less than what I just had to pay for the taxi I otherwise wouldn’t have needed. United still hasn’t learned that insultingly low compensation is worse than no compensation at all.

After a not glorious two hours of sleep, I started my workday. Noon came – no bag. They have an app to check on delivery status. The app said delivery by 3 PM. 3pm came and went – no bag. Then, without apology, the app changed to say delivery between 6 to 10 PM. 10pm came and went – no bag. Each of the four successive promises in writing, broken.

By 10 PM I called to inquire/complain. The first agent said – almost word for word – ‘when I hang up with you, I’ll take a thousand more calls from people looking for their bags. You should be lucky we found it at all.’ The second agent was slightly kinder. He called the third-party delivery service, who said it would arrive that evening despite it being after the given window, and offered me a $150 voucher for all the trouble. ($150 plus the initial $50 still doesn’t make up for the lost day or my out-of-pocket costs, but it at least it isn’t insulting.)

The app said deliveries not made by 11 PM would roll to the next morning. By 11 PM – with me going on 2 hours of sleep for the last 48 hours – I was beyond exhausted and I gave up and went to sleep. Yet at apparently at 11:05 PM I got an email saying the bag had been delivered – complete with a photo of my suitcase on my porch. No one called, I didn’t sign for it, and I hadn’t clicked the “wave signature” button that authorized a drop-off without a signature. But there it was – sitting outside my home all night.

This entire experience highlights United’s sheer incompetence during irrops. The airline is aggressively courting Denver passengers to abandon Southwest, but if this is what United has to offer to travelers from Denver, people should think twice. Any carrier can have delays, but United’s inability to fix a mechanical issue at its own hub in under seven hours is frightening. That coupled with chaos in communication, no agents, app errors, luggage mismanagement, and insulting compensation reveals a company not in control of its own operation or indifferent to the burdens it places on passengers. And, more importantly, if they don’t have the mechanics, parts, or processes in place to repair a just used plane on the ground at Denver in less than seven hours, I’m not sure I trust them to keep any of their aircraft safe in the sky.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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