Originally Posted by
nauce
The variance in quality is, quite frankly, horrifying. Of course, I've never run a company with 16k+ employees. Cannot even imagine how hard it would be to begin firing someone in that role. Yuck.
Gotta assume that those people will stay in the role until retirement.
And yeah, it's sad.
I gotta defend the "senior" employees here. Before 2012 there was a dedicated system of routing to senior agents for GS and 1K. Most of the time you got a HNL or DTW agent, and they were great. As a GS in hundreads of calls over a number of years I never had a HUCA issue. in 2012 they combined the senior sCO agents and went to shares. I found the sCO agents were trained to say no, and I would HUCA trying to get someone in DTW or HNL, but then they were not as proficient with SHARES. Lots of hanging on the phone while they tried to do something. Also losts of "I know this is what fixes the problem, but we have been told expresssly not to do this, and I'll get written up".
That UA does not have great CS for GS (and 1Ks) is simply a management decision to save money. I'm sure in the spreadsheet world set up by the Smith Street Gang having GS and 1K go to regular agents (1) better used resources and (2) reduced the "expenses" that were being incurred by having agents who know how to fix issues fix them.
The problem at UA is not the employees, its the management.
Originally Posted by
nauce
Just wanting to provide some followup on my choices thus far.
I've decided to take a couple months of booking "whatever makes the most sense for my routing."
Emirates has made up the bulk of my travel in the last 4 weeks, and I have to say that I'm blown away by the hard product. Their customer service can be a bit hit or miss, but it's crazy to think that I've never had to wait on hold (and I have zero status there as of now.)
Their first class pod/enclosed-suite is really quite impressive. That's not to mention that the Henessy Paradis doesn't hurt. =]
I'll continue to loop back with what I decide, but my early leaning is to go free agent.
Thanks everyone for your guidance and feedback!
And this is the end result of penny pinching management, loss of the pounds....