Real-Life Family Reunion Brought to You by United Airlines

You have probably seen the latest United Airlines commercial at the 2008 Beijing Olympics: a woman says goodbye to her husband for a business trip, leaves her heart behind as a token of her love, only to be reunited with her husband, all thanks to United Airlines.

That’s nice.

Anita Cabral’s real-life, horrific story of a family reunion with United Airlines, on the other hand, is heart-breaking.

According to a San Diego Union-Tribune report, Ms. Cabral had hoped to reunite her grown children and her terminally-ill ex-husband:

Cabral had meticulously planned this vacation, built around a family reunion in Hawaii and a chance for her grown children to see their father, Cabral’s ex, who was in a hospice dying of cancer.

Eight people were making the trip: Cabral, her husband, her brother, her son, her daughter and her daughter’s husband and two children.

One year out, they wrote a five-figure check to reserve a five-bedroom, five-bathroom beach house. They bought their tickets from United six months early. They booked a jungle excursion, a luau, a trip in a glass-bottom boat.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and they had a big investment in it, emotionally and financially. They even had it insured.

And all that planning unraveled in just a few hours.

On the eve before their big trip, according to the report, some members of Ms. Cabral’s family could not check in using United’s website. After making excuses, United finally confessed: they had been bumped from the flight and their seats had been sold to other people. Gerry Braun of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote:

United - after holding their money for six months and bumping them from the flight on the eve of takeoff - had no plan to help Anita Cabral and her family.

Alternative flights were proposed. But they separated the party of eight into pairs, and staggered their arrivals over several days, and sent them to different islands (leaving them to fend for themselves).

[Ms. Cabral's] 7-year-old [granddaughter] has special needs and had not flown before. Both of her parents wanted to be with her. But that counted for nothing.

In the end, the best United could offer was a flight that arrived five days into their weeklong vacation.

Click HERE to read what happened to the Cabral family.