Originally Posted by
FlyWorld
Nobody who flies on United Continental for more than 75,000 miles per year would ever agree with this assertion.
I can. I can count the number of times that my contributions to airline coffers (mostly UA) since my college years have been channeled through a phone agent. 99.9% (well, I might be exaggerating by a point or two
) of my purchases have gone through the internet, and I go all the way back to United Connection on Compuserve. I understand that many people have complicated travel requirements, but mostly, people purchase and travel with little if any snags in between.
I had been saying this for years before the merger, that UA provided the best customer service when I didn't have to talk to any UA staff--except FAs, but including phone agents. IMO, automation is great, and more the better. If UA had chosen Apollo, we'd still be talking about "dot bomb" and complaining about how utterly useless it was when compared to the much better CO's. (see below)
Originally Posted by
FlyWorld
Smisek has trashed the old United Airlines computer systems and replaced them with a buggy and unreliable system that doesn't work...
It's fashionable on this board to blame everything on SHARES, but the fact remains that UACO's website and mobile app are, in most practical instances, better and more automated than those of other airlines. Thanks to SHARES, and no thanks at all to Apollo. PMUA never even bothered to develop a mobile app at the time of the merger when PMCO already had a very functional one going.
The reason is that PMCO and now UACO owns an intellectual right to SHARES. Developers can tailor-make information in SHARES to provide more functions for .com and app. By contrast, UA had sold Apollo; DL sold Worldspan; and AA sold Sabre. DL got religion and recently bought back some rights from Worldspan (now Travelport) so that it could start catching up to UA. AA can't do much with Sabre, and that's why AA's website and mobile app are almost completely useless for anything beyond booking flights (can't even do this on the app; it takes you out to the mobile site) and FLIFO (I'm exaggerating, but not by much).
I'm not saying that SHARES is the best CRS. There are many things about it that annoy me, like the inability to replicate PMUA's WILMA boarding process and auto-cancelling all my downline flights when I SDC and the system mistakenly assumes that I no-showed for my original flight. I am saying that SHARES, Apollo, Worldspan, and Sabre are all of the same ilk, that they come with their own quirks and idiosyncrasies.
From a passenger's perspective, UA is the most automated airline among the US3 (plus WN) right now. This year I began splitting my flying between UA and AA. I've needed to call AA for assistance even for mundane things that UA's website and mobile app can easily handle. To me, that constitutes inferior service. YMMV of course.