by Donald Wood
Last updated: 2:27 PM ET, Thu September 14, 2017
UPDATE: 2:45 p.m. ET 9/14/2017
In response to the report that United Airlines left a 77-year-old woman unattended at a gate in New Jersey for 12 hours, the carrier denies that she was bumped, saying instead that she missed her connecting flight from Heathrow Airport.
In addition, United also sent TravelPulse a statement on the incident:
"While we offered our customer a hotel and to take her there, she declined our offer of assistance. We checked on her throughout the evening. We have since spoken with our customer's family to express our sincere apologies. We are working with our team at Newark to review what happened and to ensure we learn from this incident."
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United Airlines is dealing with more bad publicity. According to WUSA-TV, Steven Williams dropped his 77-year-old mother off at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Virginia, where she was scheduled to board a connecting flight to Newark Liberty International Airport.
Williams' mother is confined to a wheelchair, so he used United's service program to take care of the elderly woman and wheel her to and from her flights. While the woman made it successfully to New Jersey, she was bumped off her connecting flight to London.
At 4:30 a.m. local time, Williams received a text message from a driver he hired to pick up his mother in England that she never arrived. Williams called United officials, who assured him that his mother had indeed made the trip overseas.
Unfortunately, the elderly woman wasn't on the flight. After hours of panicked phone calls, he found out that his mother had been bumped from her flight to London and had been left alone in the Newark airport for 12 hours.
Airline officials offered Williams' mother a hotel room for the night, but she had to get there on her own. The woman was unable to push herself in the wheelchair, so she sat in the airport for 12 hours.
[READMORE]READ MORE: What do you Mean United did Nothing Wrong?[/READMORE]
"I want an apology and to know this won't happen again with my relatives or anyone else's relatives," Williams told WUSA-TV.
United officials reportedly called Williams Tuesday to apologize for the incident and offered his mother a $1,000 flight voucher. The airline also released a statement.
"This never should have happened and we have spoken with our customer's family to apologize," a United spokesperson said. "We are working with our team and our wheelchair assistance vendor at Newark to review what happened and to prevent this from happening again."
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