Loss of Bag Tracking with Move to SHARES
Spoke with a very friendly Service Director at DEN late last week about the transition to SHARES in early March. While much of the information she shared about her on-going training has already been discussed here a new bit came out that I hadn't heard yet and was hoping a resident UA staffer could comment.
She said that SHARES (or whatever the baggage subsystem is called) does not include any real-time bag tracking component and that they will stop scanning bags durring aircraft loading, unloading, and a bag-belt delivery when UA transitions to SHARES. As many of you know, UA is somewhat unique in that they scan a bag several times throughout the journey and maintain that scan history (similar to FedEx). This history and help resolve lost bag issues much more quickly and I imagine saves both UA and customers with displaced bags a lot of time and money. I think Delta has implemented the process (and even allows customers to follow along with their iPhones) but CO has not and the new UA will not.
My hope is that legacy UA agents and management will be able to attest to the significant inefficiencies once SHARES rolls out and over the years they'll get patched back to PMUA standards.