Originally Posted by
ijgordon
.... I've been keeping up with this thread pretty well, and I really haven't seen many, if any, legitimate situations where UA's change prevents them from doing XYZ. Lots of (absurd) complaints from people who claim they're now going to have to spend hours on the phone with a reservation agent to find a flight that they can confirm a GPU/RPU on. Newsflash (for the fourteenth time!), you can still see if flights have "R" availability or not during the search process! It's maybe 2 extra clicks. Big effing whoop. ....
while technically correct (I have posted the alternative method a couple of times myself). The workaround just provides an yes/no answer and the lack of a numeric value of award seats / upgrades is a significant reduction of information - which might be used to determine urgency (acknowledging inventory can be withdrawn at any time).
However, this thread is much more than about this feature deletion. The frustration and irritation of many of the responses shows a very hostile UA-customer relationship. And by the number on non-regular posters -- runs fairly deep in the FT community (include a significant number of new posters) -- not just the regular posters. There have been a series of mis-steps, customer unfriendly actions by UA and this feature deletion has torched the simmer discontentment of the community. This should be a big red flag for UA. Earlier I posted about the
communication failures of this announcement.
So is some of this is a bit irrational, yes -- but there is a reason / history that has lead to this.