Welcome to “Your Edge Case is Showing!” In this series I discuss real world software edge cases that happened to me. The goal is to have a constructive analysis of the problem, the thinking behind it, and why it probably hasn’t been fixed despite being broken in production. As a general disclaimer – I’m using the software because I like the company and I’m a customer.
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I really like United Airlines, they really do have the friendliest people of the major US airlines. But this article isn’t about people, it is about software edge cases.
The edge case is simple: United’s ticketing software breaks your group into individuals when you fly standby and the individuals lose all perks (earlier boarding, luggage, etc) from higher status members. To put it in RPG terms – when you fly standby on United, you lose your party modifiers.
This isn’t a problem when flying home, but it becomes a mess if you fly standby on your outbound leg.
I recently flew United with my family, and on our way out we got on an earlier flight by flying standby. Selecting standby wasn’t obvious, but there was a friendly agent by the computers who helped us out.
What wasn’t clear, is that by flying standby we were no longer flying as a family, but as 4 separate individuals.
The edge case kicked in on our way home. My wife could check herself in, but the rest of our family was missing. My bags were free, but since I was traveling alone, everyone else’s bags were $40. Our children had become unaccompanied minors.
The kiosk couldn’t find the original record and the self-check-in helpers didn’t believe us when we said the computer was wrong. We eventually went to an agent, who was able to find the original record and correct things manually. It took her more than 15 minutes and she had to call for technical help.
What’s Probably Going On
Turning a party of 4 into 4 singles probably makes the standby logic much simpler. Once regular boarding is complete, the software gives out any remaining seats based on some algorithm. Having groups makes filling the plane much harder as the software would have to account for priority and size.
Why Doesn’t It Get Fixed?
Fixing it would likely make the standby logic much more complex to handle a rare edge case.
Families flying standby on their outbound leg seems to be so rare that no one at the ticket counter had heard of such a thing. Flying standby is a business user move and business fliers usually use it to fly home. Power users are usually high status fliers, so even when the party modifiers disappear, no one notices.
The one change I would ask for is to make it easier to track the status of the reservation over time. Once the reservation was changed, there was no evidence in the system that we used to be a family traveling together. Even the agents didn’t believe that parties could be broken up!
