Employees Not Management Put things Right

[Mike Scott]

Someone at United Airlines has a heart after all. But don't go looking for it at the corporate offices. The folks there are still coming up with excuses for their scandalous treatment of Anita Cabral and her family, whose long-planned Hawaiian vacation was ruined when United refused to honor in June the tickets it sold them in December. In this saga, the good guys don't wear suits. They wear uniforms.

Yesterday, as the airline was giving its latest jaw-dropping explanation for its behavior – more on that later – its pilots stepped up to help the victims.
“We're obviously not in the business of trying to make up for all of United's misdeeds, but this is a unique situation,” Capt. Jay Heppner, a spokesman for the pilots union, told me. “We're just horrified at what happened to this family.”

Heppner called from London after reading last week's column recounting how United – on the eve of the Cabral family's flight from Los Angeles to Kona – bumped them from their long-assigned seats. As a result, the party of eight had to cancel a much-anticipated vacation and missed a family reunion and a visit to Cabral's ailing ex-husband – the father or grandfather of half the party. He died soon after.

The United pilots can't heal those wounds, Heppner said. But today Cabral, of Spring Valley, will receive a check from the United chapter of the Airline Pilots Association for $11,693. That covers their nonrefundable expenses, primarily the cost of renting a beach house they never set foot in.

Meanwhile, corporate United has opened an investigation. “We screwed up,” spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said. But United's explanation of how it screwed up – version 4.0 – is enough to shred your last bit of confidence in the airline's reservation system. Urbanski said the Cabral family was bumped from the plane not because United overbooked the flight, but because the family overbooked it. She said the family reserved 16 seats – eight with United and eight with US Airways, which operates one leg of the flight – and as a consequence, lost all 16 seats. Urbanski said a United employee saw both sets of reservations and “mistakenly and regrettably canceled the wrong one.” I ran this crazy scenario past Deanna Kawasaki, who made the reservations for her family. Kawasaki runs a Simi Valley consulting company and is a fastidious record keeper. “That's ludicrous,” she said.

Kawasaki said she has never booked anything on US Airways, which, after all, doesn't even fly between Los Angeles and Hawaii. “I know what I did,” she said. “I only put my credit card in one place.” Urbanski had an explanation for that: The Cabrals made an “unconfirmed reservation” – a reservation that wasn't confirmed and wasn't paid for. That sounds like an oxymoron to me, and I told Urbanski so. I don't believe airlines hold seats on flights if no one's paid for them, not for more than 48 hours, anyway. They certainly wouldn't hold them for nearly six months, not for a peak-season flight to Hawaii. She assured me they do it all the time. Maybe that's why United is losing money.
Kawasaki was not so amused. “They're grasping at straws,” she said.

For United's story to hold up, she pointed out, we would have to believe that a cash-strapped airline held eight unpaid seats on a sold-out flight for six months and never sent her an e-mail of confirmation, or one asking for payment, or even one to inform her that she had lost her seats. She noted that United has tried blaming the debacle on a flight cancellation, then on a lost reservation and then, by mail, on a “Schedule Change due to Operational problems affecting our operation.” Only after the family retained a lawyer, she said, did it point its finger back at them. I trust Kawasaki. But following Ronald Reagan's admonition, “Trust, but verify,” I called US Airways anyway.
I found Derek Hanna in the media office and asked him if US Airways had booked any reservations for Cabral or Kawasaki on June 16. “We don't have a record of any reservations for them,” Hanna reported back. He said that includes “unconfirmed reservations,” a concept I had to explain to him.

Then, late yesterday, Urbanski said the “unconfirmed reservations” were made through Orbitz.com. She sent me a word document dated Dec. 28 – a day after the family bought its tickets on United.com.

“None of this makes sense,” said Kawasaki, who told me she never booked anything with Orbitz, and certainly wouldn't have done so one day after forking over $7,715 to United.

Putting on her consulting hat, Kawasaki said United has serious problems if it's accepting “unconfirmed reservations” from third parties and using them to bump paying customers from its flights.

No one's disagreeing.

The Cabral family, meanwhile, is thankful for the pilots' generosity, but weary of United's ever-evolving excuses. “We just want this to end,” Kawasaki said.

In a note, Anita Cabral wrote, “My husband, a Methodist minister, is in the forgiveness business – not me.”

While United has not sought nor acquired her forgiveness, she said, the pilots redeemed the company in her eyes.

“God bless them, they are the true heroes in this mess where so many people have behaved badly.”