It has become a rather crappy airline this year. Didn't used to be so bad (although United has never been good for inexperienced travelers..) I keep flying them but I watch my reservations/seat assignments obsessively now and I read this forum obsessively to make sure I know what's currently broken in United's IT systems so I can watch out for it. It's a huge waste of my time.

When others ask if I would recommend United, I tell them absolutely not. Not without 1K status and not without being willing to babysit your reservations obsessively. These days I recommend people fly JetBlue, Southwest, or Virgin domestically. Even when I fly with my family now, I'm going to have to take another airline because of the randomly changing seat assignments - just can't trust these clowns to not scatter us all over the cabin.

I have hopes that someday they'll fix things. I'm tolerating it for now only because there's some uncertainty ahead for AA (bankruptcy, potential merger with US). Once AA gets the uncertainty behind it, I'll have to evaluate how things are going.