Transparency in the Airline industry

I am a very frequent flyer and the last 30+ hours have been a partial disappointment.  Last night, as noted in a previous post, the radar at Mexico City went down - screwing up lots of flights.  But what we faced at many points was a lack of clarity of our situation.  We would ask the personnel of United Airlines a specific question and either get a wrong answer or one shaded without much truth.  That is disappointing.  The station chief, who was a guy named Christian, seemed to try to work very hard and admittedly some of the problems were caused by Mexico.  For example, perhaps a thousand people slept in the airport last night and in the morning were sleeping on the hard marble floor.  At about 4 AM this morning a police officer began to roust people from their sleep saying it was illegal to sleep after 4 AM.  Clearly these people who all had their bags next to them were stranded travellers.  Clearly, they were waiting to get into the counters, which opened about 4:30 to get rebooked.  So the police officer's notion of what to do was absurd.  All of the hotels in the area around the airport were booked.

One whiner complained so much to United and threatened that he would not fly them again unless he was upgraded and they did it - I am not sure why they chose him.

What was wonderful about the effort was the general nice spirit that this group of a couple of hundred people on the flight took to the problem - very few whiners.  A lot of looking out for each other.  And even some joking.  I learned a couple of words in Spanish for fun (diversión) and was able to argue a group of us through the security gate when we found that the boarding passes we had been reissued had the wrong date.  (In SPANISH!!!)  But the lack of clarity in telling us what the situation was was annoying.  The almost final straw was at about midnight we went out to the plane - in one of those Dulles busses and then sat on the tarmac for about an hour only to be told that we could not take off because LA customs had closed down.