21A

Not flying today, but went to the airport this afternoon to check out how things were going. Some observations:
- Things were quiet. No lines and not a zoo at all. It helps that the Saturday afternoon schedule out of PDX is quite light and almost all UX; I don't know if it was worse in the morning with the mainline departures. In general, the agents seemed to be paired up, with sCO agents walking sUA agents through processing requests.
- The kiosks worked and several folks were successful in using them to check in. It sounds like the reports of broken kiosks were temporary or sporadic.
- The kiosks appear to be able to recognize any of the new PNR, PMUA PNR, or PMCO PNR for lookup. And they do now seem to be able to read the name correctly from the 2012 cards, unlike last night.
- The front page of the kiosk UI is the same style as before (with references to Continental removed). Upon finding your reservation it switches to the PMCO kiosk UI. [Off topic note: why does everyone complain so much about the CO website, but not about their kiosks? I actually think the website's not that bad and better than PMUA's, but the kiosk UI seriously looks like Windows 3.1, complete with stock graphics of people, clip-art icons, and white on yellow Arial text. This is one area where the PMUA design was much more elegant.]
- The new bag tag numbers appear to start with 4016 (as opposed to 3016UA and 0005 before).
- The bag tracking kiosks have been updated. They now have a UI that looks like the CO kiosk software (the magnifying glass icon, the interstitial graphic of the airplane on the "one moment please" screen, etc). Just out of curiosity, did sCO have bag tracing kiosks like this, or is this brand new?
- As before the kiosks can find the status of a bag by scan, tag number, PNR, or (now 8-digit) MP #. They return a status along the lines of "your bag arrived on flt #XXX at 00:00 and was delivered to claim #Y", but when I tried to print that status information, the kiosk froze for about 2 minutes before giving up. Also, the ability to read a MileagePlus card didn't seem to be working yet. Now if only they could get this tracking info to be available on the web, too (a la DL)...