airline suckage redux

I've been hating on airlines more than usual recently.

Yesterday evening I paid over $1200 for a three-legged post-Christmas route between the Bay Area, Maui, and the Big Island. I'd been watching the fares since May (which was unfortunately before we decided to go for sure) and this particular route had never gone below $983. I finally pulled the trigger because they were down to three seats left on only non-stop flight between Kona and the Bay Area. Grr. (On the other hand, deals for early December are plentiful; I've seen ads for sub-$350 roundtrip flights. Darn high season.)

Then, I discovered this morning that because we'd booked our upcoming East Coast trip through continental.com (using Continental miles) on flights operated by United, we had no seat assignments. We would have gone seat-less ("you will get a [super-crappy] seat assignment at the gate") except that I pulled United Premier rank to get us Economy Plus seats. Whew.

Finally, I randomly checked our October DC itinerary online and discovered that it listed our status as "Schedule Change" instead of "Confirmed". It had a red warning that instructed me to call customer service to confirm. I spent over 20 minutes on the phone with the rep just to reconfirm that flight. WTF? Last month I got an email from Virgin America with a schedule change, which required about ten seconds and two button clicks to confirm.