This. IRROPS doesn’t just impact passengers, but completely impacts ops, expenses, etc. Any airline scheduling say, 1000 flights knowing they have to cancel, say, 100, is going to lose a lot more cash than they would just selling the 900 they would eventually run. Aircraft and crew are all in the wrong place. Lots of overtime, calling in reserves, then having less staff at the end of the month due to duty limits. The parts of operations most pax see and generally think about is probably only a small portion of the items an airline needs to handle to properly operate a flight schedule. Chaos doesn’t help airlines, because they still need to deal with the impact, which takes a lot more effort and resources than just not scheduling them in the first place. I suspect they’d almost rather not have the extra cash in that case.

lots of issues now - airlines don’t know where, when or what will hit, and so don’t know how that will fully impact ops. This has a history with things like weather, and that’s why carriers have been moving to pre-emptively cancel when they know weather will likely hit to avoid uncertainties. With the pandemic, there is just so many additional variables that are more unknown. Have no idea what the rate of crew calling in sick was traditionally, but they had pretty stable data on that pre-pandemic, and so were able to fairly accurately predict how many might call in sick, and had reserves to handle. Now they don’t know if that number will call in, double, triple, or whatever. They have a plan for hiring or recalling X number of crew back, but if they only were able to attract 70% of that number, well, that has an impact - note thats not UA or even industry-specific but over multiple industries. They have to rely on others also - maybe UA is staffed up, but ATC is short-staffed (EWR summer flight cuts, for example). Or security can’t handle the amount of pax they planned for. For international, all sorts of requirements for crew that might not have been there in the past they need with regard to COVID. This all costs more time, resources, etc. the industry in general is a mess, and yeah, I’d agree with above that UA in general, is seeming to do better than many others right now. Look at Canada, look at EU, airlines and airports in all those places seem way worse off.

I just flew AC to Asia, and we took off YVR-NRT an hour late, and they left one of our bags in YVR, delivered 2 days later. That is a much easier travel experience than I expected, honestly.

it is what it is, and it’s going to be a while before it gets better. Anyone coming in with expectations of the same travel experience they had in 2019 is going to be sorely disappointed. Come in with the expectations of the reality on the ground today, and it will be that much easier for all.