The meta-narrative on United is now firmly established and runs through untold threads on this board. What's wrong with UA? Easy. Nutshell:
- Adversarial attitude to customers
- Disinterest in operational excellence
- Layoffs and outsourcing further degrade reliability / customer experience
- Employee / labor factors out of control
- Cutting services and amenities while others add
- Indifferent to customer loyalty factors
- Steadfast refusal to improve irrops recovery
- Nonexistent or implausible brand marketing ("XXX-friendly")
- Making the UA-brand "network" more and more dependent on erratic, understaffed, unreliable affiliate regionals
- Regularly missing performance targets and blaming all kinds of external culprits
This particular "savvy management's" era is going to be remembered at UAL the way the Cerberus Capital guys are remembered at Chrysler. People thought Steve Feinberg was pretty savvy too, back in 2007. Chrysler almost collapsed and got taken over by Fiat -- which suggests that in the long run United could become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alitalia.