We don't know whether to shake our heads in disappointment or fall off our chairs laughing about this letter "giantreesemar" from Flyertalk posted. Evidently, the flier sent a letter of complaint to United Airlines, and received this incomplete form in return.

The background story, according to giantreesmar, is he had set up a fairly complicated award itinerary, with United promising to hold it for three days. The traveler then made another change with a separate agent, who didn't mention the hold time. Looking it up online, the traveler saw it would be held until midnight. At 5 p.m., however, giantreesmar checked on the reservation and found all of the segments deleted. Straightening everything took another hour on the phone and added frustration.

Apparently the situation was eventually resolved, and United tried to send a letter of apology. But it looks like they forgot a few key components.

Reached for comment, United spokesman Charles Hobart acknowledged the error:

"We mistakenly sent the customer an unfinished response letter. We've reached out to the customer to apologize for the inconvenience and address the customer's concerns."

Giantreesmar, didn't seem too worried, quipping online, "I will really enjoy my (SPECIFIC ITEM)."

In fact, he later followed up on the thread with an update:

Just got a call from United HQ and spoke to a nice woman who was very apologetic and noted that it is indeed "embarrassing." I was laughing, and really do hope I didn't get anyone in too much trouble because I've made mistakes like this myself and would be terrifically mortified if someone posted it on flyertalk

Either way, she noted that this was supposed to be the letter that accompanies some form of compensation for my prior complaint email, not necessarily the only thing I'd receive on the matter (as I noted earlier, I did get an email in about 4 days that was sort of standard boilerplate apology, but my complaint didn't really call for a specific action other than fixing their site). Somehow the letter went from generating the template to sending before the agent got to fill in the blanks. Whoops.

Either way, she did say that SPECIFIC ITEM is on the way (although I didn't ask what it was). I think this whole thing is more funny than frustrating, so the suspense will have to dog me a bit longer!

Also to her credit, she did listen to me explain my issue with the bug on their site (she referred to them as the dot com department) that mis-displays how long reservations are "held" until. We'll see if it actually gets fixed now!

We're glad everything got straightened out in good spirits.

[Via One Mile At A Time]

Filed under: Stories, Airlines