Originally Posted by
Kmxu
There are too many problems when flying UA. They simply do not care for passengers. For example, both of first legs of my recent trip had crew rest caused delays, which would definitely cause misconnections. No one at UA protected me for later connection flights at four hours before the departure times. If I did not act, I would stuck at EWR on inbound and ORD on outbound. As a 1K, I wish that I could be treated better.
The CO procedures for rebooking do not take into consideration a multi-hub environment with proactive reroutes.
The only procedure they have is to autoprotect when a misconnect looks likely
after you've departed on the first leg (i.e., already pushed back) and are wholly reactive.
That may have worked in the CO world with limited hubs -- someone flying AUS-IAH-LAX would want the next IAH-LAX when en route to IAH.
In the PMUA multi-hub environment, the strategy has always been to proactively avoid the problem and route around the issue. That's why PMUA would be putting in protection ahead of time for Premiers when something was up, usually rerouting you another way. I would show up at the airport, and there would be some other route in my record, I'd go check in/recheck in, and be alerted to the issue (e.g., we're having issues in Chicago and think it's best to send you thru Dulles today).
That's also why UA's computer systems were optimized to handle multiple segment swaps easily (e.g., change SFO-ORD-PIT to SFO-IAD-PIT), whereas CO's are optimized for one-to-one exchanges (e.g., change IAH-LAX to the next IAH-LAX -- anything more than that is time consuming in SHARES, because it simply didn't happen much in the CO world).
The CO procedures are designed for the customer to roll with it and take what they're given after they're messed up. That doesn't work for an airline this size when customers are interested in reaching their destinations in a timely manner.