As I'm sitting in the ORD Admiral's Club gtalking to Ben who's at the RCC at SFO, he tells me that they announced his flight has gone mechanical and they'll announce at 7:10 an update. Since that's when they were originally supposed to depart, that means he'll be late (he was originally scheduled to come in about 90 minutes after me with a 40 minute earlier departure).
At 7:10 when I'm supposed to go to my gate to board, he texts me that his flight was cancelled. Now as I'm heading to the gate for my flight, I'm trying to text/gtalk/SMS/talk him through what he needs to do next.
UA non-stops the next day are both zeroed out (no surprise). I tell him that he should insist that they push his ticket over to another airline to leave SFO tonight (rather than making him go home and come back for an 8am departure through IAD arriving more than 24 hours late as they auto-rebooked him on). He has the typical experience calling - some agent isn't willing to do that and claims it's not possible as the system already rebooked him.
Following FT mantra (if you don't like the answer, call again) he called back armed with information about flights which were leaving that night connecting to LHR flights which would get him here the same day (but 7-9 hours later) and he got a helpful agent who pushed him onto the AC flights through YYZ (Toronto). He got in at 9pm instead of 1pm the same day at least.
Now the big issue will be to make sure he gets the Double EQM he's supposed to for the original flight which requires requesting original routing mileage credit and hoping it gets in there before the DEQM posts so that it happens automagically. Otherwise who knows if there will even be a way to fix this in UAs MP+ system...
