Dear de-valued airline company:

What in the name of god are you thinking? You can’t treat your customers like this (maybe you didn’t get the memo, because you treated me like this. More than once in three days.) By the way “this” is the following:

• Overbooked flight from Dulles to Savannah
• Bumped me from the flight due to “weight restrictions”
• First bumped, then allowed, then yelled at and then rebumped my co-worked from the same flight
• Unable to get me a direct flight out of Dulles on United or any other airline considering the fact that the remaining United flights were all overbooked (seeing a trend.)
• Forced me / co-worker to drive from Dulles to Regan
• Forced me / co-worker to switch airlines
• Flew from Dulles to Miami on American Airlines
• Flew from Miami to Savannah on American Airlines

Total Travel Time: 16 hours

Then, on Friday:

• Flight from Savannah delayed 30 minutes
• Arrived at Dulles 40 minutes late
• Kept on plane for 10 minutes while waiting for “gate agent”
• Only let off the plane when plane was refueled and the flight crew was forced to open the plane due to federal regulation (in her defense, the stewardess did try to let us off early but was unable to due to lack of gate staff)
• After running to gate (which was 2 gates away) informed that flight to Indianapolis had “borded a long time ago and was gone (This was still 2 minutes before scheduled departure time.)
• Faced with a line for 20 people, went to automatic kiosk and found out I had been rebooked on a flight at 10:03 pm. It was 5:00pm.
• 5 hour wait at Dulles
• Arrived in Indy around midnight to discover that we had no luggage.
• United gate agent told us that the luggage never left Savannah due to a weight issue.

Two interesting policy notes:
Policy 1: A reservation does not guarantee you a seat.
Policy 2: In the event of an overweight plane, the gate agents are SUPPOSED to take customers off the planes and put luggage on instead.

United, you should really take the time to try and realize several things:

1. There is no way that more than 1-2 people will “not show up” for a flight. Customers get hardcore screwed over due to e-ticket refund / cancellation policies and people just don’t do it anymore. So don’t give me the “we need to overbook by 5 people” bs. That’s bs.
2. Don’t redefine real words to your customers. A reservation everywhere in the known world (including other airlines) means you have reserved ‘something.’ In the case of a flight, you have ‘reserved’ or ‘set aside’ a place on that flight. If I have a confirmation number (I did) that means I have a confirmed spot on that plane. Don’t give me a line about that not meaning I actually get to be on the plane when it leaves.
3. Stop charging me to put luggage on a plane if you aren’t actually going to put said luggage on said plane.
4. If you’re going to screw up SO badly, try to space it out a little bit. Ok? This was the FIRST time I flew United, and you literally botched everything except for the outgoing flight from Indy. 1/4 flights not in some way being jacked up aren’t great statistics to start a new business relationship.
5. Don’t give away a voucher to your customers and then in the same sentence tell them that “by the way these are pretty hard to use” and “they will probably charge you at least $20 to use this $100 voucher.”

I’m sure I’ll think of other things later that you’re doing incorrectly. I’ll think about it while I’m not flying on your airline.