Saturday, March 15, 2008

United Sucks (It's Not What You Think)

United Airlines sucks big time. No, I did not have a bad flight experience recently. My flights weren't delayed. My luggage was not lost. In fact, I fly United a lot and I actually prefer that airline to most others. So why do they suck? Credit cards.

My wife and I are enrolled in the credit bureaus' "no-marketing" programs. This means that the number of "pre-approved" credit-card offers that we are getting in the mail has greatly decreased. However, airline & hospitality credit card programs appear to be immune to our requests, and chief among them United Airlines.

Today I did some work around the house and finally got around to doing my shredding. It appears that I have amassed about 6 months worth of materials for shredding, and when I started doing the work, I noticed that there was a particularly large number of credit offers from United Airlines. This got me curious, so I actually did some counting and guess how many credit offers we have received from United in recent months. Let me save you the guessing: 55. This comes out to an average of about two offers per week (!) and these offers are not just for my wife and I. No sir. United seems to think that our five year old son really needs one of their credit cards as well.

I visited the company's website searching in vain for a way to opt-out of these useless and annoying offers. Guess I am just going to have to vent on this blog. So here goes: United, you suck!

If anyone knows of a way to stop this deluge of junk from United, please let me know.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm in their frequent flier program but haven't flown United for probably 4-5 years. I still get about 1-2 card offers from them each month. I feel your pain, maybe not as much as 2 per week though.

Anonymous said...

I work in the credit card marketing industry.

One thing you can do is call the contact number on the solicitation and tell them to put you on their "do not solicit" or "opt out" list (different companies call them different things).

They will put you on their suppression list and you should be suppressed from future mailings. It may take up to 90 days for this to happen depending on the contract they have with their database company. Our company receives optout lists on a daily basis, but it is different throughout the industry.

I do this with every Credit Card solicitation I receive and the only ones I ever get are from the companies with which I have current accounts with.

Also, you can sign up for one of the national do-not-mail lists (such as http://www.directmail.com/).

Good luck!

Unknown said...

Berate, thanks very much for the good advice. I will try it and let you know what happens. I don't currently have one of their solicitations, so I guess I will just have to wait for a couple of days for the next one to arrive...