While we're in rant mode, I'll point out that this speaks to my biggest frustration with UA and why I still regularly fly with other carriers: inconsistent customer service. They've demonstrated that they can and do provide excellent CS *at times* but it's not consistent, both from employees and in product. I understand they can't control the weather in ORD and the airspace crowding in the Northeast, but there's plenty they can control, and don't.

Consider two different routes I've flown on UA recently and commonly fly in general, with wildly different experiences:

1) PHL-ORD-PVG/HKG/PEK. I've flown these routes several times in C or F, and the service has been consistently fantastic, and even in domestic F on the short hop to/from ORD.
2) PHL-IAD-anywhere in the SE US served by certain RJ contractors (Mesa, Trans States, etc). You brace yourself for two RJ flights, disinterested ground service in IAD on a good day, RCC lounge dragons in IAD, and ATC delays (the one thing UA has less control over) with a lack of adequate info provided at the gate as to what's actually happening (something they can control).

Now, I'm not asking for widebodies with three class service on these routes, but rather UA holding its regional partners to a higher CS standard, educating its folks who work RJ gates in basic CS, and educating those employees who interact with high volume, high revenue pax (e.g., lounge dragons) in how to deal with them. Checking in at one of the IAD RCCs a few weeks ago, a 1K pax in front of me, very irritated after a cancellation and a 5-hour mech delay on his rebook, was looking for other options, and one of the lounge dragons begrudgingly found something, then wanted to charge him a change fee on it. She then proceeded to get into a loud argument, right in front of everyone, with the other lady working the desk over the appropriateness of an irregular ops change fee (her excuse was that employees had gotten shafted in bankruptcy, and she was right, but that isn't a reason to behave this way). He had to have a supervisor summoned, who put this lady in her place, but for a 1K paying for the RCC, this was both unnecessary, and if I were him, I'd be considering where to spend my travel dollars the next year. The only things positive here were that the sup did the right thing, and kudos to the other lady at the desk for speaking up, but should this pax and a lounge full of presumably higher revenue customers have needed to experience any of that?

I have historically used US the most, as I'm based in PHL, but I have spread my traffic around a bit, particularly on longer haul routes, as they've been in bankruptcy, cut onboard service and suffered their merger and other operational problems. With hubs in DEN, IAD and ORD that collectively service nearly everywhere I need to go except some European and Caribbean cities, and pretty decent PHL service frequency, UA should have been able to pick up much of my business, but hasn't. All I reliably throw UA's way are my transcons to LAX and SFO, nonstops in F to DEN, and my Asian paid C/F tickets. I don't want to have to deal with IAD that much, play the RJ lottery there, or have to deal with Ted - I'm willing and able to pay for F in most cases, and even if it sucks on US to the extent I'm willing to pay for someone else to fly me there with one stop rather than a US nonstop, I'm still more willing to take US for, say, a trip to Florida, than deal with Ted. (If DL can maintain a decent F product, I'll use them more.) And the icing on the cake is that as a Star Gold with a different carrier, should I actually want or need to talk to someone, I deal with the ICC without much luck in getting a different call center.

UA should train the ICC to do simple tasks well, and transfer the complicated ones to a different center more likely to deal with it correctly. If they could otherwise change nothing, and just get this right in the next year, their CS ratings would probably go up measurably. But I'm not even sure that UA recognizes a problem here, let alone a fix. Same with the web site.

We're witnessing a race to the bottom overall in US airlines. Like most mature businesses, the airline industry has become commoditized, but that doesn't mean there's no room for profitable differentiation that can build a loyal high-revenue customer base in addition to its commodity customer traffic. UA hasn't figured out how to do that yet consistently. This opens an opportunity for a market entrant to do it, but no one really has stepped up yet.

If I knew that I'd get good service consistently from UA, and bad service only on an exceptions basis, I'd spend a lot more on them. But there's just too many parts of UA where I can't be certain of that for me to throw more business their way. Addressing the call centers, the web site and the regional carriers would be a huge start.