United Airlines Review

We had a nice vacation in the DC area for Thanksgiving but it was time to return to Montana.

We checked in electronically at Dulles and asked the counter attendant why our seat assignments were not on the tickets.  There were to be assigned at the gate, so away we went.  Once arriving at the gate an hour prior to boarding, the counter person seemed to be on a personal call on their cell phone with ten people in line.  After thirty-five minutes, we received our seat assignments:10A, 16B, and 21A.  We advised this was unacceptable as we had a 2 1/2 year old and one of us needed to be seated next to her.  "If you had arrived earlier we may have been able to help.  The flight attendants will have to help you with that" was his response. 

Once we boarded we advised the flight attendant of our seating issue, she indicated it's the gate agents job to assign seats and we should speak to the other passengers to swap seats.

Considering there were three families with kids under three and they all had the same issue with none of their seats being close to the kids, the parents all decided we would sit the kids in the reserved seats and tell the passenger of the seat we were occupying to find another.  There were a few complaints to the flight attendants, but they just looked at us in question of what to do and followed with our suggestion.

Sadly, we had two more flights to get home and the situation occurred again on the second flight.  The gate attendant and flight attendants left it up to the passengers to make the decisions on how to seat the passengers with kids.  This occurred because our first and second flight were on the exact same plane with the same crew.  The flight number changed, so they made everyone get off the plane and re-board with a different set of tickets.

Our third flight, the gate attendant actually gave us seats in the same row.  This was possible because there were only thirty passengers with over eighty seats on the plane.

All in all, we are not going to use United again.  We do not have very many choices where we live, but we have never had any issues in the past two years flying to DC with our daughter on Northwest or Delta.  They get more than a one star because they got us home on time and provided complementary refreshments on each leg.