I have funny friends.

My friend James e-mailed me a copy of a letter he sent United Airlines this afternoon. While I typically only put my own writings on this blog, I felt I needed to share what James wrote with the masses. Not only because it's intensely amusing, but also because the masses need to be educated...



Dear United:

I am writing to express how much I truly have grown to hate your company. I often tell others about my hatred and I realized as I am sitting here trying to get home on an earlier flight after you canceled all the morning flights to my home city, that I have not taken the time to tell YOU why I hate you.

Let me try and summon my muse for a moment...

As a business traveler who often changes his schedules and flights let me tell you how obscenely angry it makes me when I call you to change a flight. The typical "well sir there is a mandatory $100 fee for absolutely nothing, and of course the fare difference." Amazingly the fare difference always exceeds $100, and on top of my wonderful change fee (for nothing) means that is costs me over $200 to change a flight from one day to another. I hope you have a sweet party with all that money I paid you to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! $200?!?! To change me on to another flight where there is an opening, after I have paid you $450 for a ticket?

I am fine with high ticket prices, oil is expensive therefore jet fuel is expensive, this does not bother me. But charging me $200 to move seats when I have already paid for a flight is bullshit, and you know it.

That is your first piss-offable offense.

The second was your move to "economy class". You took your planes, squished together the back seats to make a few more inches of leg room for the front seats, then proceeded to charge more for the front seats. As many of my flights are short, I do not pay for economy class out of spite. You blatant disregard for your customers is truly inspiring.

Your third offense is always managing to put me in the middle row, even when I book my ticket far in advance, check in early etc. Somehow my boarding pass is always missing a seat number and I have magically found myself in the middle seat between the worlds two largest humans. Thank you for that honor and privlege.

Your final offense, and perhaps this is the fault of some partner or subcontractor, is send me a United credit card offer in the mail EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE WEEK! Perhaps you use the money from your economy class scam to do this, but I open my mailbox each day to find a letter from you. I open it, thinking perhaps it is a check for all the money you stole from me for flight changes, but no, it is a credit card offer. As if I would even want to get more miles so I can fly with you more.

Luckily for you, my travels often take me to cities where your $400 + fare is often the cheapest, and as we know, airlines have fallen to the true bottom of the sales and marketing game and lost all ability to provide real value. It is ONLY about price, not value, not experience, just price. As this is the case I am forced to fly with you from time to time, and it is truly a terrible experience.

I have informed my assistant to avoid booking me on United flights like the plague. I aske her to try Frontier and Delta, American and Southwest, Alaska Airlines and Japan Air, JetBlue and Pete's Flying Taxi. To look at charter flights and freight flights where we may be able to stow aboard with cases of bananas or chickens in order to avoid flying on United. But at the end of the day, sometimes your flights are still the cheapest, so back to the airport I go on my travels with United, my travels which are oh so subject to change, and you company which is oh so unable to be even the slightest bit flexible or sensible.

I hate you United, unfortunately I will probably see you next month.