⭐ Overall Score: 7 / 10
- Pros
- Hot breakfast on a 2.5 hour flight
- United lounge in Denver has good food and helpful agents
- Good selection of streaming entertainment
- Cons
- Disappointing service for a misconnection by United gate agents
- Odd downgrade situation on a paid first class ticket with first class seats available
- No seat back entertainment
This United Airlines domestic first class flight from Denver to Louisville delivered a solid onboard experience, with a comfortable seat and a surprisingly good hot breakfast for a short flight. However, the overall trip was marred by a frustrating misconnection and poor customer service during rebooking, which highlighted some operational inconsistencies. While the inflight product was perfectly adequate, the ground experience left a lot to be desired.
Booking
I was flying from Colorado Springs to Louisville. Colorado Springs is a relatively small airport, but it happens to only be about 90 minutes from a very large airport in Denver which is a hub for United. Typically, I would fly American through Dallas for this, but United had far more convenient flight times through Denver so I went with that option. Now the judgment call I had to make was whether to take the under 45 minute flight from COS to DEN or just take a car 90 minutes directly to Denver. Normally, I wouldn’t role the dice with a connection and would just drive. However, I was traveling for meetings with an organization separate from my day job and they have their own travel agent to work with who strongly suggested that due to road work between Colorado Springs and Denver, I shouldn’t risk the drive (it didn’t occur to me at the time that I was flying on Sunday afternoon which was unlikely to be a heavy traffic day). This turned out to be a mistake…
I booked the one way itinerary from COS-DEN-SDF in first class for $423.18. The itinerary left me with a little over an hour to connect in Denver. There was a short snow storm in the area and that of course caused a delay, but when the inbound plane finally took off from Denver I still had enough time to make the connection especially considering my connecting flight was going to be very close to my arrival gate. But I had tempted fate and fate won. Once the flight arrived, in what almost started to be a comedy of errors the ground agents couldn’t get the jet bridge to the plane and that added another hour plus to the delay. Flight connection missed.
I don’t fly United a lot and I have to say I wasn’t impressed with how they handled the misconnect. No one in their right mind would fly from Colorado Springs to Denver to stay in Denver, so it’s safe to assume everyone on the plane was connecting somewhere and many of those people missed their connections after a two hour delay. United automatically rebooked me on a flight the next morning, but didn’t assign me a seat and wanted to charge me to select an economy seat (keep in mind I was on a paid first class ticket). Two agents met the arriving flight, but refused to help anyone – apparently their only job was to handout business cards with information on how to contact United reservations which was – to put it mildly – less than helpful. I’d already established that I couldn’t fix my issue online and of course the wait time for a phone agent was long. Fortunately, I could access the United lounge via my Star Alliance Gold status with Air Canada and the agents there were much more helpful and gave me an aisle economy seat towards the front of the plane. I was told the fare difference between first and economy would be refunded to me automatically because of the involuntary downgrade which I was skeptical of, but was tired and just wanted to get to my Denver airport hotel so decided to just role with it.
Airport Experience
Because of the overnight delay United sent me a virtual $15 voucher for food at Denver airport. I ate in the lounge before heading to my hotel the night before, so decided to use it to grab breakfast the next morning at Shake Shack. First time eating breakfast at a Shake Shack which I assume is only available at airport locations and it was quite tasty. So tasty in fact that I forgot to take a picture of my bacon, egg and cheese sandwich.
After breakfast, I headed to the gate. I was surprised to see an upgrade list that had already cleared several flyers with my name nowhere to be found given that I’d been downgraded from paid first the night before. Fortunately there seemed to be one seat still available…but no gate agents. So I went back to the United Lounge to see if they could rectify the situation. Unfortunately, they said the flight at that point was under control of the gate agent (who at the time did not exist). I went back to the gate and waited patiently for someone to show up hoping I wouldn’t lose the seat to another frequent flyer upgrade. When the agent showed up I explained the situation and he looked at my reservation and said there was nothing indicating I’d been downgraded (again United wasn’t impressing me much). However, he accepted the email confirmation I had showing my original booking and gave me the last seat. He noted that I’d be surprised how many people lie about having paid for a first class seat and he was right I was surprised as I can’t imagine trying to pull that off. Wouldn’t United’s records make it obvious that someone was lying? On the other hand they couldn’t find a record showing that I had been downgraded so who knows.
Aircraft & Cabin
First class on the A319 has 12 seats in a 2-2 layout. I took the only seat available which was 3A – the window seat on the left side of the plane. The A319 first class seats have 37 inches of pitch and are 21.1 inches wide. This is basically the same as American domestic first class.
Predeparture drinks were offered and I had a glass of water. I’ve always liked United’s blue plastic glasses for some reason.
Seats
There’s nothing about domestic first class seats to get that excited about, but it was fine for a 2.5 hour flight. Had I wanted to rest, the seat had a slight five inch recline that I didn’t utilize.
The tray table comes out of the armrest and was plenty big enough for my laptop. There is an additional drink size tray table on the front of the center console. Each seat also had a power outlet to charge your devices as well as a USB A charging port.
In-Flight Entertainment & Connectivity
While there was no seat back entertainment system, United does offer a good selection of movies and tv through its streaming platform. As I had some work to catch up on I didn’t utilize the system, but I have in the past and it’s easy to use. One requirement worth noting though is that you need to have the United App on your device which is not required by American, so you’ll want to have that installed before you depart.
United has announced that it is rolling out free Starlink wifi, but unfortunately it wasn’t yet on this flight. Having experienced Starlink on Qatar Airways flight last year, I can confirm it is a game changer for in flight connectivity. This flight still had United’s old wifi available for $8 to United members and $10 to non members. I didn’t need it on this flight so can’t comment on the speed.
Food & Drink
Having become so accustomed to the American Airlines snack basket, I was pleasantly surprised to be served a hot breakfast on this 2.5 hour flight. It didn’t hold a candle to my bacon, egg and cheese from Shake Shack, but the eggs were hot (and I think real) and the fruit was fresh. The hashbrown was more soggy than crispy, but otherwise no complaints on this one.
Arrival Experience
Unlike the prior day’s travel mess, this flight was smooth sailing and arrived in SDF on time. Now this wasn’t a given since a huge storm was expected to hit Louisville, but the pilots kept assuring us we were going to get in ahead of it and they were right. Whether they got out to their next destination before it hit I’m less sure about.