United came up short even on the in-flight video endings.

Both “Mamma Mia!” and “Battlestar Galactica” were cut off tantalizing moments before grand finales on my United Airlines flight this week from Chicago to San Francisco. And that frustration fit a broader pattern for me on United this holiday season. I found the airline—to which I’ve long been loyal—to be wildly inconsistent with its customer service, a sign of less-than-stellar management of the firm’s 52,000 employees.

Yes, the holidays are stressful for airlines and their employees. And they’re made more so when bad weather strikes, as it did in the past week or so in the Midwest. But that doesn’t excuse the way United failed to organize its bag-check lines effectively in San Francisco. Or the way one agent washed her hands of the chaos, saying she was going off duty. Message to passengers: We don’t really care.

During my journey back to San Francisco from Minneapolis on Tuesday, I got a different message: We don’t really care if we give you accurate information. The day started with a canceled 9:30 a.m. flight. If my wife and I had gotten a phone message about the cancellation and the later assigned flights, we might have spent time sledding with my nieces and nephews rather than killing time in the airport. I know United makes such calls. I got a canceled-flight alert on my cell phone on our way out to Minneapolis.

United might have called me Tuesday morning, but I don’t know for sure. No message was left. Then, when we spoke to a ticket agent, she said the cause for the cancellation was weather-related. But later, other United officials said a mechanical problem had led to the delay.

The sense of being lied to grew stronger during the day. First, the Minneapolis ticketing agent indicated that my family of four would be getting first-class seats to Chicago and business-class seats to San Francisco. As it turned out, she may have been fudging or woefully inexact: A United reservations official informed me later that just I had the fancier seats, not my wife and two kids.

In any event, United ignored any and all upgrade promises. No first-class seats for any of us to Chicago. And we barely got seats together in the back of the economy section on the flight to San Francisco. To add insult to injury, a gate agent in Chicago seemed to chide me for expressing frustration over losing any upgraded status.

There were moments of great service scattered throughout my holiday journeys on United: safe, competent piloting, for starters. Plus savvy, empathetic flight attendants.

But United does not get full marks on the subject of cabin-crew staffing. On the Chicago-San Francisco leg, our 747 jet was delayed for probably 30 minutes or more because the airline had to scramble to assemble just a skeleton crew of attendants. And the notion that the company was pinching pennies on labor was reinforced when we landed in San Francisco. Even though the plane was late and some passengers had tight connections, the jetway operation crew was missing in action, leading to another delay.

(I’m not sure if United hires jetway operators. But even if it doesn’t, it reflects poorly on United managers that they didn’t marshal one in time to meet our plane.)

I’ve flown United for years as my primary airline. I’ve stuck with them partly because I am sympathetic to the employee-ownership model they’ve tried. And United just announced a smart-sounding program that lets employees earn up to an additional $1,200 yearly for on-time performance.

But United clearly has something wrong in its culture. A recent federal report found it to rank 17th out of 19 airlines in terms of complaints per 100,000 enplanements during October. And this holiday season made me question if I should continue giving United the gift of my business, and wonder why the airline doesn’t seem to engender the same level of employee enthusiasm and service as other organizations inside and outside the airline industry.

The bungling was summed up for me by the way United botched the in-flight entertainment on our flight home. Just as a struggle between Cylons and humans was about to come to a head in “Battlestar Galactica,” the airline switched over to “Mamma Mia!”

A fine movie, but the crew didn’t time it right, either. Right before Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and others were about to sing another ABBA song during the film’s credits, the entertainment stopped. We were descending into San Francisco.

Maybe there a silver lining there. United chopped off the tune “Waterloo.” When it comes to people management and service, maybe the company isn’t quite ready to surrender.