Originally Posted by
sbm12
Not really. The difference is that it doesn't have the FastSHARES skin on it, not that it is worse than Apollo. That's coming soon, though a bit later than desired, and it will certainly help things. But knowing that the UI skin is coming it is foolish to bemoan the underlying system as so bad. Because it isn't. There will be some training/growing pains, just like it will take some time to get wifi deployed or the CO planes reconfigured for e+. Nothing in a merger like this happens instantaneously. And once all is said and done there is no reason to believe that the long-term functionality of the system is going to be significantly limited based on one underlying technology versus the other. Certainly not to the extent being bandied about here.
I'm not saying that SHARES without the UI is going to be faster or better than FastAir. But I am saying folks are comparing different things and not looking at the bigger, long term picture with most of these comments.
While I see your point, I think the big concern is the pain in the near term, and then how long that near term may be, combined with the architecture choice and what it means on a day-to-day basis in the long term.
Keep in mind that they've already scrapped FastSHARES and are doing something different. This delay and sometimes get scrapped. But I agree with you, it will probably be a good thing to give the CO staff the tools they need, and to restore for the UA staff the tools they had taken away.
The next is the architecture choice. CO tends to think the back-end system is secondary and likes programming everything in ancillary systems. That's fine on paper, but in reality, what we've seen is that you lose the robustness and related functionality with some ancillary apps since they're not as tightly integrated (e.g., the inability to waitlist with EUA, or the inability to pull miles at the gate). There are also some reliability concerns (e.g., the dropped partner space issue), but I'm not sure why that happens to CO records as often as it does.