Ligia and I were supposed to arrive in the United States yesterday. Instead, we were stuck in Frankfurt am Main for the night. We were on the third leg of our return trip to the United States, and everything was going well. We had left Cluj yesterday morning on a Lufthansa flight to Münich, where we boarded another Lufthansa flight headed to Frankfurt.

We arrived in Frankfurt at 4 PM, and promptly made our way to the gate for our connecting flight to Washington’s Dulles Airport, which was supposed to leave at 5 PM. We had over a mile to walk to the gate, but we made it there at 4:20 PM. This was a United Airlines flight. UA and Lufthansa are part of a group called the Star Alliance, and they apparently hand off flights between each other.

When we got to the gate, we were told to wait in line in order to receive our boarding passes. I’m not sure why, but we hadn’t gotten them in in Cluj, which is where we started the first leg of our flight. The Lufthansa reps there told us we would get them in Frankfurt. And so we waited, patiently, along with an elderly Romanian lady who had started her trip in Bucharest. Her name is Maria Țonea. It’s important because she ended up in the same situation as us, and she got treated worse.

I want to make it clear that all three of us (Ligia, myself, and Mrs. Țonea) were on time at the gate for the flight. Its departure was at 5 PM, and we got there at 4:20 PM, while Mrs. Țonea had gotten there even earlier. They had started boarding the flight when we got there, and we waited for the clerks to finish processing some Russian women that were holding up the line.

When it came time for us to get our boarding passes, the clerk, a German woman in her twenties, started to process our tickets and stopped, stating that there were no more seats on the plane. I couldn’t believe it. We had paid for our tickets a long time ago, checked in just fine in Cluj, and they should have received the confirmation that we were on our way to the flight, so why weren’t our seats saved for us?

I asked her how that was possible. I explained to her what I just said above. She said, and I quote, that “United Airlines had overbooked the flight, and that there were no more seats on the plane.” I asked a UA rep, a translator, who was checking people’s boarding passes, an tall African American man, to confirm this, and he spoke with her, then confirmed her statement.

“What are we supposed to do?” I asked them. Their statement, and again I quote, was that it was “Lufthansa’s fault”, and that I should go to a Lufthansa counter and get them to book us on the first flight out to Washington.

I didn’t quite understand this at the time. After all, if it’s a United Airlines flight, and they overbooked it, it doesn’t make sense that it’s Lufthansa’s fault, but I soon found out that was their way of not having to live up to the Star Alliance Passenger Rights, which require that they (United Airlines) do the following in the event they deny us boarding:

“If in case of overbooking you are denied boarding involuntarily on a flight for which you hold a reservation, you are entitled to care and compensation without delay and to a refund [...] In addition you are entitled to re-routing, under comparable conditions, to your final destination at the earliest opportunity.” There is also some cash compensation involved, also “without delay”, which for our flight would have likely been 400 € per person.

At any rate, United Airways was more interested in passing the buck on their screw-up, which is why they sent us back to Lufthansa. After walking another mile or so back to a Lufthansa counter, we spoke with three reps, one of them a Flight Manager, and informed them of our situation. They were very helpful and contacted other Lufthansa agents to see what could be done.

Lufthansa’s official stance on this was that it was United Airlines’ fault, because they had overbooked the flight, and they were the ones that needed to make the proper reparations. They gave us the Passenger Rights booklet from which I quoted above, and they waited over 20 minutes on hold to try to speak over the phone with the United Airlines supervisor in charge of the particular flight to DC, UA 933. Her name, and this is very important, because she bears the bulk of the blame, if not all of it, is Zarah Smith.

I learned from the Lufthansa agents, while they were waiting on hold, that Zarah Smith had already gained a reputation among the other agents at the airport for turning away customers from UA flights, and for being rude to them and not abiding to the Passenger Rights when refusing to let them board. They didn’t mince their words. They said she customarily “lies” to cover up the way she does business, and that it’ll be “interesting” to hear what she comes up with when they get to speak with her.

Well, it certainly was interesting. Zarah Smith did not disappoint. She lived up to her reputation, and once the Lufthansa agent explained to her our situation, she wanted to make it clear right away that we (all three of us) had been late for the flight, and that’s why we were turned away. It didn’t matter that we had gotten there at 4:20 PM, 40 minutes before the flight was scheduled to leave, after rushing to the gate through the entire terminal, on multiple levels, and that they were just boarding people when we got there — according to Zarah Smith, we were “late”, and that’s why she denied us boarding and turned us away.

Oh, and it also didn’t matter that we hadn’t even seen her at the gate or spoken with her there, apparently she had spoken with us and turned us away because we were late. This was one cold lie after another, each of them put forth to cover something up. Starting to see how badly this makes United Airlines look?

The Lufthansa agent insisted with her, and she finally agreed to meet us at the gate (C9) in order to discuss the situation with us. The Lufthansa agents warned us that she will not want to help, and that we should be prepared and fight for our rights as passengers. They told us that if she refused, Lufthansa would book us on one of their flights as a courtesy, but they couldn’t cover the hotel and dinner costs, since it was United Airlines’ responsibility to do so, not theirs.

We walked back to gate C9, where we asked the airport security folks to locate Zarah Smith. She showed up, and as soon as she met us, before we could ask her anything, wanted to make it very clear that it was our fault, and that we were late for the flight. These were such brazen, outright lies, that Ligia and I were shocked. Mrs. Țonea unfortunately couldn’t understand her, since she doesn’t speak either English or German, but once we explained to her what Zarah Smith was saying, she was shocked as well, and couldn’t believe how that woman could dare to openly lie like that.

How could Zarah Smith dare to re-affirm these lies when she had three people in front of her who knew they were on time, and who got there with plenty of time to spare? This was beyond me.

I told her that I wouldn’t stand for her lies. I told her Lufthansa had warned us that she might try to do this, and that Lufthansa knew were were on time, and that we knew we were on time. She said it didn’t matter what we thought or were going to say, because her records showed that the plane left with empty seats, and that we had been denied boarding because we were late. She also said that it was our word against hers. This is where she gave herself away. You see, the clerk who was trying to process our tickets at the gate earlier had told us there were no more seats left on the plane, that it was overbooked. The clerks had confirmed that over the phone with the Lufthansa reps when they contacted them. Yet here was Zarah Smith, telling us that the plane still had available seats when it left, and that she had made the decision to not let us board, apparently for “being late”, which was a bold faced lie.

This was unbelievable. I think smoke must have been coming out of my ears when I heard her. I told her then that I would not only write about my experience, using her full name, but that I would also write to the United Airlines CEO (currently Glenn F. Tilton, who is also President and Chairman of the company) and let him know directly what sort of an employee she was. She said I could “go right ahead”. Very well, I did it, as you can see.

We pressed on, asking what she was going to do to make reparations, and she finally agreed, “as a courtesy” [sic] to book us on the earliest flight out to DC. Problem was, this wasn’t a “courtesy”, it was her duty, and she also wasn’t living up to the rules stated in the Passenger Rights booklet that Lufthansa had given us. She held to her lies, insisting that we had been late, and that she didn’t have to obey those rules.

At any rate, we walked back to an UA counter, where she booked us on a flight the next day. We got her to give us our checked luggage, and we paid, out of our pockets, for an overnight hotel stay in Frankfurt and for meals and taxi rides, since Zarah Smith and United Airlines didn’t seem to want to live up to the Star Alliance Passenger Rights. We showed up this morning, boarded that flight back to the US, and are now home.

The story doesn’t end here though. As if treating all three of us like that wasn’t enough, Zarah Smith overdid herself in the way she treated Maria Țonea. While we were there and translated for her, she promised to take care fully of the elderly Romanian lady, who didn’t speak English or German and couldn’t get by on her own in Frankfurt. When we asked for details about what she would do, she refused to give them to us, and asked us categorically to leave the UA counter, since she was done with us. The phrase she used, and I quote, is “She is my customer, and I will take care of everything for her. I no longer need you.” We insisted, and she said a translator was on the way, and we were no longer needed. We left, and met us with Mrs. Țonea the next morning, only to find out the following from her:

• NO translator ever showed up. Instead, Zarah Smith called the lady’s sister, who spoke English, and explained that since there were “no hotels within 2 hours’ distance of the airport”, that she would put her up in a room with a bed at the UA lounge and provide her meals. This was yet another lie. We stayed at a very nice Holiday Inn hotel about 7 minutes away from the airport, a 4-star hotel by the way, and there were plenty of other hotels right there by the airport where Zarah Smith and UA could have put up Mrs. Țonea.
• Mrs. Țonea was then ushered out of the lounge and made to sleep on airport benches, with only two thin airplane blankets given to her, on a cold Frankfurt night.
  
• She was given NO food. Instead, she was offered tea or coffee, then left alone, to fend for herself in a strange airport with no one to talk to, since she didn’t speak the language. Nobody looked after her, and no one came to see her in the morning, to ask her if she was okay or hungry, or anything.
  
• Instead of being booked on the flight, she was put on Standby status, with no assigned seat, and it was likely that she wouldn’t have gotten a seat on the plane the next morning if we hadn’t asked her to go see Zarah Smith directly and to literally pull on her sleeve and wait there by the desk in order to press her into giving her a seat on the plane.
  

That’s how Zarah Smith, a United Airlines supervisor, takes care of United Airlines customers after lying in order to refuse them entry on United Airlines airplanes. That’s how badly she’d have treated us if we hadn’t argued with her and hadn’t spoken the language.

The questions I have for United Airlines are as follows:

• What are you going to do to address this visible and horrible customer service issue? Are you going to reimburse me for the expenses my wife and I incurred in Frankfurt?
• Is Zarah Smith the sort of employee you want to have? Is she the sort of supervisor that sets the right example for her subordinates, and for the UA office in the Frankfurt Airport? Are you going to tolerate an employee whose business practice is to lie, chronically?
• Is it common practice at UA to overbook flights, then turn passengers away, leaving them completely on their own in a city they’ve never visited before? Is this only a Zarah Smith practice, or is she acting on some hidden company policy? Can you please reassure me that this is not the way you intend to treat your customers?

The questions I have for Lufthansa and for the Star Alliance in general are as follows:

• In light of what has happened to us, do you feel United Airlines is a good business partner for you? Furthermore, do you feel they are a good member of the Star Alliance?
• Given what the Lufthansa agents at the Frankfurt airport know about Zarah Smith’s behavior, are you, and how are you going to address her case with United Airlines? Will you continue to tolerate her behavior and treatment of your customers?

In addition to writing about this issue on my site, I will also write to UA’s and Lufthansa’s management, pointing them to the URL of this post and to the questions I’ve posed here, to see if they respond, and what they have to say. And I will be looking for a reimbursement of my overnight stay in Frankfurt from United Airlines.

(16 votes, average: 4.88 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Follow my posts. It's easy and free.