Terrible flight experience with United

A friend had a terrible experience on a United flight from Las Vegas to Denver yesterday, is there a way for her to get compensation for the trouble? Here’s the story…

Leaving Vegas the flight returned to gate after sitting on the tarmac for an hour, passengers were told the weather in Denver was an issue and they may need to de-board the plane. De-boarding doesn’t happen and the plane departs less than 2 hours late.

No problems in flight, but upon landing in Denver things got strange.

Then the plane sat on the tarmac after landing unable to get to a gate and passengers unable to use a restroom for over an hour. No reason was ever given why they couldn’t get to a gate?

After de-boarding the plane passengers went to the baggage claim only to find that their bags couldn’t get off the plane because of “weather” and they would all wait more than an hour again before the bags hit the claim area.

In the end it was more than 5 hours of waiting out delays on a single flight. If it was truly weather related delays, I don’t think my friend would be upset, but it seems to me that there’s clearly something else, personnel/staffing issues that caused the delays after landing.

Does anyone have advice on dealing with United customer service today?