Every day for a week I checked the United Airlines website to find any reward seats available around Christmas, and every day I found dozens of results.  Every flight I tried to book, however, produced only an error message: “this flight is no longer available.”

Some would call this “false advertising.”  I just call it “mean spirited.”  I naturally called United’s customer service number, very politely reporting the error and soliciting help.  I got only a brick wall.  One agent did offer to check for tickets available through other airports for me, which yielded this gem (keeping in mind that my destination is Denver):

Okay, I have a flight on the 16th into Colorado Springs.  It connects through Denver.

Resigning myself to buying a ticket with a $400 holiday markup, I ran a Kayak search.  Enter JetBlue!  They sold me regularly priced seats on non-stop flights in the middle of the day on the exact days I selected — and without any need to call customer service.

My opinion of JetBlue goes up every time I encounter them.  They only started offering non-stop daytime service to Denver fairly recently, so I haven’t flown with them much before this year.  Now I’m not sure why I’d choose any other airline.

At a time when American Airlines fires employees for communicating with the public and punishes its skycaps for collecting tips, and when United Airlines is now misleading its frequent flyers through a faulty website (thereby potentially ruining holiday travel plans), why would anybody want to fly on a “legacy carrier” when the likes of JetBlue are around to take their place?