Originally Posted by gglave

Going to be dramatically worse this summer once the cruise ship season starts and frequency increases.

Originally Posted by fly18725

In-sourcing of out stations is unique to the North American market. Many foreign carriers outsource most or all of their outstations. If you manage your vendors well, it is possible to not even know the difference between in- and out-sourced employees.

Originally Posted by weirdlyndon

Maybe they'll outsource the ground handling to Air Canada (similar to how United does ground handling for Air Canada at JFK) and maybe these UA employees will get hired back? Fingers crossed that whoever is chosen to handle UA at these stations, the the displaced employees get an opportunity to at least keep a job in some capacity.

Originally Posted by fly18725

In-sourcing of out stations is unique to the North American market. Many foreign carriers outsource most or all of their outstations.

Originally Posted by mahasamatman

I never noticed a frequency change over the summer.

Originally Posted by tom911

You really do have to wonder if the grand plan is to only have UA ground employees at the hubs when all the cuts are over. Isn't this about 10 stations outsourced now in the last few months?

Originally Posted by weirdlyndon

Maybe they'll outsource the ground handling to Air Canada

Originally Posted by fly18725

In-sourcing of out stations is unique to the North American market. Many foreign carriers outsource most or all of their outstations. If you manage your vendors well, it is possible to not even know the difference between in- and out-sourced employees.

Originally Posted by sfozrhfco

Don't think that even UA staff at hubs are safe at this point. If the first goal is to reduce costs, regardless of the outcome, then nobody at the company is safe really. They already outsource much of the flying to UX. UA can just become a holding company to manage a largely outsourced work force. Seems that is the direction they are headed.

Originally Posted by sing-along

I believe CO in YVR was outsourced. (If not, then my example below shows how little CO employees care about customer service and standards).

Originally Posted by Darlox

The airline business must be a surreal one for anybody arriving from any other industry... Manufacturing, IT, and customer service businesses all went outsource-crazy in the 90's and 00's. They "saved costs", realized that their product became wildly inconsistent and they lost a lot of control, tried increased management oversight, tried chasing lower costs in emerging service industries, tried other stuff...

Now they're all re-IN-sourcing and still somehow "lowering costs" (as far as they tell their shareholders) by pulling it all back in. Taking advantage of "higher skilled" workers, touting "flexible" cost models, etc...

If a company is badly-enough run that they can't run an efficient operation under their own control, it always astounds me how many companies believe they can run a more-efficient operation by inserting a middle-man and letting somebody else run the same operation while trying to enforce the exact same operations model. This only works when you're talking about un-skilled labor, in highly-structured working environments. That sort of personnel mix would only work in the airline business during those rare instances when absolutely everything is going smoothly and according to plan, with no glitches, and no changing factors...

Dismantling their station network, while maintaining their flight network, is eventually going to go down in business history as a decision about as brilliant as betting the farm on 50-seat RJs.

Originally Posted by sfozrhfco

Don't think that even UA staff at hubs are safe at this point. If the first goal is to reduce costs, regardless of the outcome, then nobody at the company is safe really. They already outsource much of the flying to UX. UA can just become a holding company to manage a largely outsourced work force. Seems that is the direction they are headed.