As airlines cut their schedules this fall, more passengers will experience the ups and downs — mostly the downs, actually — of their automatic rebooking programs.
When a flight was rescheduled, airlines used to rebook passengers manually. Now they’ve given the job to a computer.
Sometimes the process goes smoothly, sometimes not. The computer often comes up with ridiculous layovers — either way too long, or way too short.
Jeff Stone is discovering just how far these computers can take you into the twilight zone. My client was booked on a San Francisco Paris business class ticket in September on United Airlines. His wife, using frequent flier miles, is on a separate reservation. Since United has no nonstop to Paris, we booked – in June – the outbound flight via Chicago, the return via Washington.
Now the fun begins.
United has had some small 10- to 20-minute schedule changes since we booked, no cancellations this time, and nothing that really affects the connections. Plus none of these flights are full. But last month, the computer switched his late September flight from Paris-DC-San Francisco to Paris-Chicago-Sacramento-San Francisco.
(For those who aren’t regular fliers, United has 10 nonstop flights a day between Chicago and San Francisco. And Sacramento is 86 miles from San Francisco, with only little commuter planes.)
We sorted the tickets out, and put them back through Washington on the return. Now, this weekend, United put in another small schedule change: 20 minutes longer in Washington on the return. And no, they didn’t change his flights back through Sacramento. This time, the computer routed him Paris-Chicago-Las Vegas-San Francisco.
Once again, we humans have stepped in to reinstate the original booking.
But the time and work by me, my client, and the United reservations agents who have had to help us fix this is already exponentially over what it would have taken to adjust the reservations manually in the first place.
The cheerful United agent who Stone talked to said “United should change its Web site to “Pardon our Dust – Under Construction” as they redo their schedule.”
