As I watch the Olympics this week, my thoughts keep turning to Anita Cabral of Spring Valley, though she is not an Olympian, or even an athlete.
Cabral is a disgusted former customer of United Airlines, the official airline of the Beijing Games. I think of her whenever I see that United commercial with the orchestra of animated sea creatures playing Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue.”
I love the music, but I don't feel rhapsodic when United's logo appears. I feel blue.
The very mention of United reminds me of how the airline ruined Cabral's dream vacation and treated her family with an arrogance that is astonishing, even for an airline.
I know. Tales of airlines screwing over their passengers are a dime a dozen. Everybody has a horror story to tell.
But not one like this.
Cabral had meticulously planned this vacation, built around a family reunion in Hawaii and a chance for her grown children to see their father, Cabral's ex, who was in a hospice dying of cancer.
Eight people were making the trip: Cabral, her husband, her brother, her son, her daughter and her daughter's husband and two children.
One year out, they wrote a five-figure check to reserve a five-bedroom, five-bathroom beach house. They bought their tickets from United six months early. They booked a jungle excursion, a luau, a trip in a glass-bottom boat.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and they had a big investment in it, emotionally and financially. They even had it insured.
And all that planning unraveled in just a few hours.
The day before they were to depart, Anita's daughter, Deanna Kawasaki, received an e-mail from United telling her she could check in her party online. But the site would not let her.
When she called United to see what the trouble was, she was told the flight had been canceled.
But that made no sense. Her stepfather had just confirmed his seat, using a different reservation number, so the flight obviously wasn't canceled.
United threw out another explanation – a computer “lost” their reservations. That made no sense, either. If her reservations weren't in the computer, why did she get an e-mail telling her to check in?
At last, United confessed. There was indeed a flight, but they'd been bumped from it. Their assigned seats had been sold to someone else.
It's funny how every story of airline misbehavior inevitably arrives at this junction – the point at which a passenger must debunk a blatant lie to learn the truth.
Perhaps airlines like being caught in lies, if only because of what follows: The passenger, now distrustful of everything the airline says, is inclined to walk away and make other arrangements.
But other arrangements are hard to make when you're flying from Los Angeles to Hawaii in the middle of June.
And United – after holding their money for six months and bumping them from the flight on the eve of takeoff – had no plan to help Anita Cabral and her family.
Alternative flights were proposed. But they separated the party of eight into pairs, and staggered their arrivals over several days, and sent them to different islands (leaving them to fend for themselves).
Kawasaki's 7-year-old daughter has special needs and had not flown before. Both of her parents wanted to be with her. But that counted for nothing.
In the end, the best United could offer was a flight that arrived five days into their weeklong vacation. They declined, and got a refund.
Cabral has a theory for this shabby treatment: fuel prices.
Between January and June, as the oil industry mounted its historic shakedown of consumers, the price of those tickets tripled. The folks who paid the most got to fly.
But that doesn't explain why United continues her torment.
Remember that Cabral had vacation insurance. Her family received refunds on most of the deposits, but not on all of them, and not on the $10,693 they spent on that beach house.
The insurance company has denied their claim, but the family says all that's needed to prove their case is a letter from United explaining what happened. But United, they said, won't write that letter.
Weeks ago I contacted United's media relations folks seeking an explanation for this abysmal conduct. I never heard back. Maybe they were busy dreaming up further indignities to heap on a trusting public.
Ironically, Cabral knows a lot about the airline industry and its troubles. She works for the Navy, managing a division that handles contracts for SPAWAR, the San Diego-based Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, and oversees $30 million a year in air travel.
You'd think United would want to be nicer to someone in her position.
“Their automatic response is always, 'We're sorry if you were inconvenienced.' There's no 'if' to it. We were inconvenienced. And they're not sorry,” she said. “I want United to be sorry enough to quit treating people like this.”
Adding to her regret, her ex-husband, John Kakahio Cabral, died July 2 at the hospice where his children had intended to visit him.
So, every time I see that clever United commercial, I get a little angry. But that's nothing compared with what Anita Cabral goes through as she tries to block memories of a year's worth of hard work and anticipation.
“Every time I see Hawaii on TV or in a magazine,” she said, “I just feel sick.”
Gerry Braun:
(619) 542-4563; gerry.braun@uniontrib.com
