Don't book United!

In my teaching assignment yesterday, I found myself sitting around most of the day as the students were taking a Chemistry test. To that end, I surfed the net most of the day. On a whim I decided to check on our airline reservations for the trip in May. Much to my dismay, I found that 3 of the 4 flights had schedule changes, and when I went to view our seat assignments, 9 of our 12 seats were showing "AVAILABLE". "SAY WHAT?", was all I could think. I sent off an e-mail to United Airlines asking why our assigned seats are showing available. I have a reservation number, confirmation number, Mileage Plus number, seat numbers, etc. etc. etc. The response we got at 9:00 p.m. last night was in summary, "We are sorry some of your original seats have been reassigned, this could be due to a change in schedule, aircraft type, or computer shuffling. Although you selected your seats, this is not a guarantee you are going to get them. "All is not lost", you can visit with the airline representative on the day of the flight to request your original seating, to resolve this at that time." S was mad. "Do we have 4 seats or not on these planes?" I proceeded to try to call, but the regular customer service line closes at 7:00 p.m. CST. So I called a friend of mine who works for the local airline which is a subsidiary of United. "That doesn't sound good" she told me. "Ya think?!?" I'll check in to it in the morning she promised. In the mean time I sent another pretty demanding e-mail in response to their response, but to the Mileage Plus customer service line. After talking to Vickie, I decided to call THEIR customer service line which is 24 hours. Apparently, somone got wind of this, and I got our new flight information with seating assignments. All of the seats are the same as previous, except for one flight which they are all together, but different. I went to view the seats again, and they are now "occupied", hopefully with us! Vickie is going to confirm directly today for us. We had problems with United this last August on our Las Vegas trip. That was just the two of us though, this time we have the kids. We can't really afford to have the airline screw up our reservations we reserved and PAID FOR well in advance. Cross your fingers everything STAYS straightened out.