channa

UA agents or CO agents?

The real test will be UA agents, because they have a baseline app to compare it to.

If UA agents tell you it's good, it's solid.

A CO agent will tell you a 30-year-old washing machine is good, because they're used to doing their laundry in the river with a washboard.

worldtrav

Aero 5 rolling out, basically a GUI overlay to SHARES, much like Fast Air was to Apollo. SHARES is still the engine in the background.

mkr

I had a conversation with an "actual" 1K RA a couple of weeks ago. She shared with me that she was from the former 1K desk of UA from before the merger (when UA 1Ks actually had dedicated 1K agents for each call).

We briefly discussed SHARES and future IT changes. She said that as far as she was aware, UA was keeping SHARES for now, but was adding some "tools" to help the agents with the system. She did not expound, but to say the changes were supposed to make each phone call faster for the agents.

She also said that the agents were going to have easier visibility of the UA.com website that customers use to book reservations. According to her, right now the agents have to access UA.com separately.

CALMSP

changing a seat is probably the easiest function in SHARES. Basic 101.

channa

We don't know what it was about.

What about when there's E+ and non-status involved?

There's another thread about people having to pay a second time then refund the first fee, if they want to move seats, even if the seats are the same price.

What if they're in CheckIT and have to do something in native for some reason (maybe fees again), but they're not logged into native.

I heard someone the other day who was livid because he'd paid for E+, but there was an equipment swap, and he lost it, the GA said he should re-pay and file for a refund because she didn't see the payment in the history (not that anyone can read SHARES history, it's a mess), but if he showed his receipt, she could waive it.

That was also a "seating" issue that SHARES didn't make simple.

fastair

From a user: it is a great improvement because Aeri, which was designed for gate agent use, could not check a person in with it. We now can. Some bugs with it, but the added functionality is very much appreciated. The other noticeable change is the "spinning ball" that spun while waiting for command to be sent to HOU, converted into native shares, sent to mainframe, processed, sent back to HOU to be converted to GUI language, the sent to desktop, has been replaced with an icon of an aircraft flying. Far more pleasant that waiting for the spinning ball to stop.

Critic

Not if they knew what was good for them (which, let's be honest, SMI/J rarely does, but still...) Every time the words "IT System Integration" or "IT Changeover" gets uttered in reference to an airline, the travel press (WSJ's McCarthy and the like) get in an uproar (albeit usually a deserved uproar), and the stock price tanks in anticipation of massive delays and flight cancellations due to IT issues.

Mergers make this sort of press unavoidable, because they have to be transparent with customers of the merged company so they know where to check in, what systems will be down when, and when things are finally unified. If there is, in fact, a back end system conversion coming, UA can afford to take its time, test in the background and announce when ready because they have a functional (albeit frustrating) back end system in place. And if it's just a new agent UI, there's no point in publicizing it in advance because there would be no direct benefit for customers until the software is released and staff are trained - and even then, given UA's track record, it's probably best not to mention anything to the press until the statistics (and customer sentiment) improve, to avoid getting buried in the press for a perceived IT issue if things go bad.

Shareholder

So like they're moving from DOS screens to WINDOWS screens?

Read a story recently in AIRLINES about USAir and its history, there was a reference to their res system being SHARES (and was kept and the AmericaWest res system dumped). Would that be the same system CO was using, and UA now uses? Suppose US will migrate to SABRE, if it hasn't already.

LaserSailor

Two different versions of software will be deployed in Q4 2014

CO IT EU in Europe

And

CO IT US in the states

User adoption in the US trial version has a high compliance and satisfaction index

DENviaLAX

SHARES is going away completely pretty soon for BTW, so at least there is that. Cobra is already gone. The entire fleet is being migrated to unimatic and eLoad, so apparently not everything is going the CO way. eLoad is actually new to both sides, but is better and more efficient than either previous system, which gives me some hope. Maybe they'll eventually replace other systems with more up to date ones in the near future.

CALMSP

Changing a seat is easy. Pull up the reservation, then:

6:#@32A (enter). Done.

if someone does not know how to navigate through shares at this point, I'd put this on the agent.

SFO 1K

Sarcasm aside, mine was a legitimate question. The poster wrote:going away for BTW does not read as "going away, by the way".

So unless it was just a random statement with nothing of substance, I was treating this as legit.

Thanks for your understanding.

DENviaLAX

My main point though was that at least there is some progress being made in regards to the IT systems that are used. Changes for BTW may not be noticed greatly for pax, but it will help some. And it also shows some willingness to try to improve the way things are done.

channa

Good point.

If the customer facing stuff is as bad as we see it, no doubt the internal stuff is even messier.

Rah! Rah! CO IT!

Critic

IIRC, while the US version is also technically SHARES, it's a different branch of the code base from the CO/UA version. I know there was a thread about this somewhere on FT, but if memory serves, UA actually owns their 'branch' of SHARES and all of the related customizations, while US's version is still owned by HP.