ibuyyoufly

Me too!

Hewlett Packard is incapable of managing the SHARES system to any degree worthy of this new company. I don't understand why they don't rip up the contract and start over somewhere else.

It's my guess they could be further along with a new system by the time they got it up and running than sticking with SHARES/HP and try to bandage it together over time to do what they want it to.

Unfortunately, both choices have time and continued pain involved.

Everyone who voted to bring SHARES to the new company, I want to see you in the Board Room at 3:00 PM. Bring your ID Badges with you.

1P

I've watched you for weeks pretending that the fact that CO was only marginally smaller than UA was an excuse for the problems we are now facing. I'm glad to hear you admit that logic is clearly not your strong point.

It may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it's certainly new to newUA, since we have only recently heard about this add-on system. And your point is?

goalie

e pluribus unum

star_world

Personal attacks on your part aside - did you read my original post, or the subsequent explanation that was evidently required to help another poster understand? It would appear not. Please try again if you intend to comment on what my strong points are, or are not

Here's a fact for you (with logic included and no pretending whatsoever): pre-merger CO was slightly smaller than pre-merger UA. Post-merger UA is bigger than either one of them. Quite a bit bigger in fact, nearly double the size of either original airline. I think you'll find I've been quite consistent on that point.

Thunderroad

Please take this with all due respect: Having read through your comments, I have to confess that I'm as confused today as hobo13 was several days ago in asking you to explain your perspective. Do I have this right:

1. You're acknowledging that SHARES is a very flawed system.
2. You nevertheless feel that it is the system we're stuck with, so complaining about it won't do much good.
3. More to the point, you feel that the biggest problem with it is the very inadequate training of UA personnel to handle it.
4. You also feel, however, that a significant part of the problem with implementing SHARES is that those personnel lack the capacity and/or willingness to do so.
5. While you acknowledge that the airline is much larger in the wake of the merger, you don't see the problems with SHARES as being fundamentally a product of it being unsuited for greatly expanded and much more complicated reservation needs. Rather, more training (as per #3) and firing personnel who cannot or will not work with the system (as per #4) should make it adequately functional, even if not as good in some respects as the pre-merger UA system or as functional as it was when dealing with pre-merger CO's less complicated needs.

Do I have that right? If so, I think you differ with some of us who see the problems with SHARES (and indeed, with today's UA more generally) as extending far beyond inadequate and inadequately trained personnel. (And I might add that while there may always be problematic personnel in any large organization, many who have had trouble working with SHARES are to be admired for doing their best despite an inadequate system and inadequate training.) If not, please - again, with all due respect - clarify what you think is wrong with SHARES and UA today and what needs to be done to fix it.

star_world

Correct.

Correct.

Not necessarily the biggest, but certainly one of them. It is a major factor and is the single biggest change that has occurred. From a systems point of view the PSS is just running as a bigger version of CO - flights are still flights at the end of the day.

Based on personal experience, yes. But it's not an absolute - this definitely is not true across the board, but from my experience is true for a significant portion of the workgroup.

Roughly as functional as it was under CO, yes. I don't buy channa's argument that more hubs = more options for re-routing = vastly longer rebooking times. That may have been the case years ago but I don't believe the difference is very significant.

Hope the above helps. And thanks for the constructive post - I have no agenda here, unless you count an abhorrence for hyperbole to be an agenda I'm a passenger just like (almost) everyone else here and I want this to work. I think we have a much better chance of that if more people here can voice their opinions in a thoughtful way as you've done above, without just spewing vitriol in every post.

Thunderroad

I might beg to differ on whether or which other posters have been hyperbolic or vitriolic. But beyond that, thanks very much for your constructive reply and clarifications!

channa

That was but only one example of how the larger route network translates to a different set of circumstances for the system to handle.

In my recent 36-minute schedule change call where my remedy was to connect via ORD vs. IAH, in the CO world, and in this market, I would have been stuck with the IAH connection, so either accepted the undesirable schedule change, or refunded the ticket. Both of these are time optimized procedures in SHARES. Refund requests don't take nearly as long as the change I made.

On the mileage side, CO was not as geared towards certificate-based upgrades (they didn't have them until they partnered with UA). And even then, CO's customer base, I would imagine, didn't fly as much since CO didn't have the decades of history of a 100,000-mile tier like UA did. So while UA had a strong customer base of 100K flyers who earned lots of these certificates (10 minimum under the new earning scheme), when CO flipped the switch, CO's 75K tier earned only two if they didn't exceed the tier by 33%.

So the pains associated with how the system handles upgrades, certificates, waitlists not clearing, mishandled rollovers to the airport list, and so on, may have been present in the CO world, but there may not have been nearly as many data points to indicate the frequency of this as a problem. After all, while I have experienced some of the waitlist frustrations that others have, I have also had some regionals clear properly. With fewer instruments, I would have had fewer problems.

At the airport, UA agents are used to being able to reaccommodate a planeload of pax in minutes. CO not so much. So culturally, you have the cultures of help vs. hide. Now SHARES had tied the hands of the UA agents, and made rebooking daunting. No amount of training is going to expedite some of these ridiculous, lengthy commands. That's created a situation where UA customers are no longer satisfied with the service level.

I'm sure CO agents are feeling the frustration as well -- when UA customers want to offload rather than misconnect, this larger route network is a new world to them.

And so on. The environment between the two airlines is radically different. Whether it's program, network, customer service, etc. And the system simply isn't cutting it because it makes it too difficult to execute on procedures that happen frequently.

ibuyyoufly

I have seen you post this in a couple of places. Do you have some numbers you can share? I guess to get Full Year data, we'd have to go back to CY 2009.

I'd like to see what "slightly smaller" means. I remember CO Shareholders getting a 5% premium in new company shares, but that has less to do about business size, rather all about getting Shareholder votes to approve the merger. Again from memory, I think UA was #3 in size and CO #4 or #5.

Do you have the pre-merger numbers handy for;

Revenue
# of Employees
Revenue Passenger Miles
# of Airplanes
Market Cap

Then to keep this on topic, is there any other airline that currently uses SHARES who is the size of just the pre-merger UA?

Then to add the CO traffic/volume on top of that, all I can say is- WOW!