United Airlines Horrendous Customer Relations, No Attendants at the Gate, Missed Flights New York Nationwide

Since January of 2014, I had been flying United exclusively between New York and Denver on frequent trips every two to four weeks.  In March, I was very disappointed that upon a mandatory gate check of my carry on bag with my laptop and a 6 hour delay on my flight back to New York, that my laptop had been destroyed.  I filed a report with baggage claim, received a claim number email (which was lost) and waited the 30 days for a response, to which there was none, as they had lost my claim.  I had to take to Twitter before I received a response from the company, and ultimately received a small voucher for travel from a Customer Care Manager, Melanie Long for the inconvenience.  I thanked her and said I would give them another chance for my May trip, which I did without incident.  Only, the mileage credit was never appropriately applied to my account on my June Statement.  

My September trip, which I had the dates for months previously, should have been booked in June with mileage credit as well as the travel vouchers from the broken laptop incident.  After a month of emails and phone calls going back and forth with United, it was literally not until the Sunday before my Wednesday departure that the mileage from May was put into my account.  At this point, the airline wanted to charge me another 110.00 on top of the mileage for the one way ticket to Denver - which was absurd.  After over 3 and a half hours on the phone with them, they finally deducted the fees and I received the one way ticket to Denver - still waiting on the return flight back for that Friday, September 26th.  

Upon arrival at LaGuardia airport on the morning of my 6:50 am flight, I checked in electronically prior to arrival at the airport at 6 am.  I went to gate A2 (which is not their main gate but apparently an Annex Gate, their main gate is Gate C) at 6:27 after clearing security.  The Gate lights were turned off and not a single staff member was present.  Frantically knocking on the doorway to the corrider of the plane, after 5 minutes, two United Airlines attendants came out with coffee in hand saying they refused to let me on the plane despite that it wouldn't depart for another 17 minutes and I had already checked in.  Furious, they put me on standby for a 7:58 am flight which was overbooked and people were bumped off of, and then the 11:15 am flight which didn't depart until 12:50 pm as it was delayed from Chicago.  Literally causing me to miss my son's 11th birthday in Colorado at his school.  

I am infuriated that even the manager at the ticket counter of LaGuardia when hearing what happened shrugged his shoulders and said "what do you want me to do? We don't man that gate because it's an annex gate."  After numerous calls, and emails to United upon arrival at Denver late Wednesday, I got nowhere at all.  I still needed to book my return portion of the flight back to New York with the credit vouchers - but because of the three months waiting for the appropriate credit on my mileage account from the May trip, the return flight was now over $586 one way on September 26th.  Friday afternoon, I spent once again, over two hours on the phone trying to reach this Melanie Long in Customer Care Management in Chicago to no avail - messages left internally from reservation managers to anyone in the department.  Nothing back.  I ended up having to purchase a hotel room and subsequently booked a flight back to NY on Saturday the 27th on American Airlines.  

Exhausted and not getting home until after midnight on the 28th, I woke up to an email from United Airlines apologizing for the delay in crediting my miles - and now, I have thousands of extra miles in my account that don't belong there!  Normally one would be happy about an additional 3300 miles but I am furious.  I have credits I can't use, my email inbox is flooded with emails from United Relations asking for details on my flight disaster last Wednesday which I have provided 12 times now, I have spent an addditional 5 hours on the phone and have had numerous messages left for Customer Care.  I am out a significant amount of money due to the hotel and the American Airlines flight, not to mention there is no price you can put on missing my son's birthday party at his school.  United should be ashamed of themselves - and AFTER I had offered to give them one more opportunity to redeem themselves for the issue of my broken laptop in March.