It sounds like what happened here was "causing a child to miss a connection" (and also separately "delaying the delivery of a child's luggage"). This is of course a very bad thing.
Missing the handoff of an UM from the aircraft to their connecting gate is the same kind of service delivery failure that routinely happens to pax with disabilities who, when the third-party wheelchair vendor fails to show up, occasionally may be stuck at a gate waiting for someone for an hour. It's a really bad way for a third-party vendor to fail.
The unaccompanied minor fee is supposed to cover a really, really good white-glove service, so it's really sad to see this break down. The service is supposed to include a gate pass so you can accompany your minor to the gate; a complimentary onboard meal (food-for-purchase these days); careful handoff of the pax by flight crew to the ground staff who are supposed to be waiting to escort them to their connecting gate; and in the rare event of an overnight delay, guaranteed overnight accommodations with airline staff staying with the minor at the hotel. (This last perk is so expensive to the airlines that in the event of irregular operations that require a rebooking, UMs typically get top priority for rebooking, ahead of all other displaced pax.)
If my luggage didn't make a connection and I arrived at my final destination without it, I would think of it as "lost luggage." Would it matter to me if it was stuck in the connecting airport or sent elsewhere? No, it did not arrive with me, the airline lost it, even if temporarily. In lay person terms, the luggage is lost--the airline lost a child, yes.
Yes, I understand your point -- colloquially, one might say that the "child was lost".
Your mileage may vary, but when someone who works for a company has done something horribly wrong and I'm trying to clean it up, I often find it helpful to be careful with my language so that I can express precisely and correctly what it is that they did wrong.
This is mostly a matter of showing empathy, not being a stickler for technical correctness. When I talk to someone who can fix a horrible mistake, and I show that I understand precisely what went wrong and who's responsible without overreaching, I gain credibility and the person I'm talking to (who is after all a person, if perhaps one who has done something horrible) is more likely to believe that I understand them. If I can express that I know exactly how their system works and what part of it broke, it helps them realize that I'm seeing things from their point of view, and this can help bridge the gap between "my side" and "their side" to help them realize that we're trying to get the same thing done.
I've found empirically that practicing empathy with people makes them more likely to try harder to fix mistakes and gets better outcomes. It also saves a lot of time to be able to say "X happened", which is exactly what happened, and not waste anyone's time re-explaining the problem instead of fixing it.
But, again, this is just a thing that's worked for me in practice (as it happens, mostly with airlines). Concise, precise communication about what went wrong, who's responsible, and what I'd like to fix the problem has helped me get great outcomes dozens of times.
In my mind, "lost" implies that its location can't be figured out at that moment. While airlines certainly do lose luggage like that, many times the airline knows exactly where your bag is but due to operational reasons it didn't make the same plane.
Sometimes it goes on an earlier flight, as was the case with my bag last month flying IAH-LAX on United, a route where United has a dozen flights a day. If you're connecting, your first flight may have been delayed and they couldn't get the bag from one end of the airport to the other.
I'm not trying to say the situation doesn't suck but there is a certain logic, twisted it may be, to airline operations.
And I'm certainly not trying to defend United's actions in this instance.
Yes, it's great to be able to attract a lot of consumer attention by telling a good story -- the "United Breaks Guitars" guy certainly proved that! There is an even better option that I would be fascinated to hear whether this blogger used: the Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement Airline Service Complaint form, or the "DoT complaint", http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/problems.htm.
Domestic airlines treat statistics about these complaints as a core KPI. As a result, filing a DoT complaint has a few distinct advantages over just writing a blog post and hoping it catches on: (1) it guarantees you a response from a senior executive, (2) you can present the facts exactly the way you want (something this blog post complains was impossible when asking a customer service rep to file an internal complaint), (3) aggregate statistics about DoT complaints become public record and can help other people make informed decisions about where to spend their travel money.
In my experience, when you file one of these forms, you get a response within a week from a senior executive in Houston who has read your entire complaint, has investigated the problem, and is empowered to fix it.
It's good for other consumers to file one of these complaints, in addition to writing a blog post, because the aggregate information the DoT publishes can help consumers make better decisions. We actually have data to show that this person's horrible experience was not an isolated incident of a few misbehaving staff who did not represent the company; instead, the data suggest a pattern of increasingly scary service delivery failures. In the first half of 2012, United's DoT complaint numbers doubled year-over-year, according to the DoT's latest Air Travel Consumer Report. (See discussion at e.g. http://consumerist.com/2012/08/united-airlines-now-responsib...).
To loop things back around: the "United lost a ten-year-old" headline would be totally unnecessary in a DoT complaint, because it would rapidly reach an expert who understood the real problem and knew how to fix it.
There is an even better option that I would be fascinated to hear whether this blogger used: the Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement Airline Service Complaint form, or the "DoT complaint",
I had no idea there was such a thing. I'll file that data away, just in case.
This may sound like a stupid question, but what does 'pax' mean? I presume it's something like 'traveler' or 'client' or something similar, but was really curious what it was short for / meant.
As for the rest of your post, it was really interesting: I had no idea that there was so much involved in handling a UM (an acronym I learned about 5 minutes ago :) ).
"Losing a child" is putting a child on BOS-EWR instead of BOS-CLE and not noticing the problem until the child's family in Cleveland calls the parents and the parents call Newark, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009....
It sounds like what happened here was "causing a child to miss a connection" (and also separately "delaying the delivery of a child's luggage"). This is of course a very bad thing.
Missing the handoff of an UM from the aircraft to their connecting gate is the same kind of service delivery failure that routinely happens to pax with disabilities who, when the third-party wheelchair vendor fails to show up, occasionally may be stuck at a gate waiting for someone for an hour. It's a really bad way for a third-party vendor to fail.
The unaccompanied minor fee is supposed to cover a really, really good white-glove service, so it's really sad to see this break down. The service is supposed to include a gate pass so you can accompany your minor to the gate; a complimentary onboard meal (food-for-purchase these days); careful handoff of the pax by flight crew to the ground staff who are supposed to be waiting to escort them to their connecting gate; and in the rare event of an overnight delay, guaranteed overnight accommodations with airline staff staying with the minor at the hotel. (This last perk is so expensive to the airlines that in the event of irregular operations that require a rebooking, UMs typically get top priority for rebooking, ahead of all other displaced pax.)
Total bummer to see service delivery fail here.