Yes, this is what will happen. I know first hand YX licensed the same exact fastair interface (the GUI overlay) for use in its airport ops, and YX was on SABRE before it's demise.

I have only used fastair a handful of times; most of my airport time was spent on native apollo (GG commands, woot!). Fastair does make the agent's job much quicker and less training time. SHARES is a beast, only used it a few times when F9 was hosted and I can vividly recall it was not loved by agents.

It's confirmed: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/101222/13863558-k.html

The real question is, what's going to happen to E+ seats. ;)

R.I.P. Apollo :-/.

I don't know a lot about how SABRE works, but I have experienced US agents swearing at its existence more times than once. Not surprised at this at all though. Suspect we'll be feeling the pain at the next time I encounter IRROPS with UA once the IT integration finishes.

If we could only get answers on the continued survival on E+ (very important), and international F (semi-important)

SHARES has no place at a successful major global airline - the only major airlines that use it (Air Canada, Us Airways, Continental, and Virgin Atlantic) got stuck with it during periods of severe company financial distress. SHARES is particularly "hostile" in the area of interline bookings, which will make for alot of fun in its own right.

That said, I see it as temporary until the merged airline switches to the Star Alliance CITP based on Amadeus Altea, probably sometime mid-decade once the merger is fully completed so the cutover can be made on a "single carrier" basis.

Compltely agree. I use to work at Sabre selling againt both SHARES and Altea. You think Appllo is bad, SHARES is even worse. This is a stop gap solution until they move to a new generation solution.

However i will also say it is not a done deal the choice will be Altea either. Those talks are now open and HP/Sabre/Amadeus are all making new pitches. Whoever they choose in the end, about 2015 is about right for best case for a new res system cut over.

However there will be major pain for the old UA folks when they do take the step to SHARES. It will be a tough transition.

Shares is downright awful for agents wanting to do service recovery, re bookings, etc.This also means that (and I'm guessing all the UA codes are going away).

UA fliers (and certainly the high revenue pax) are used to the flexibility that Apollo allows. As an ex-1K i can tell you, I find it preposterous that

- it took a CO agent (at the PC) 20 minutes to rebook my ticket. The same transaction would have been done in less than 5 on UA.

- it took a CO agent (also at the PC) to ticket a reservation I made already, roughly 15 minutes to process a credit card payment

Am I right in thinking that the back end of a reservations system doesn't matter all that much, so long as the GUI is intuitive?

It really depends on what for and what you are used to. Obviously, I find using .bomb easier at this point, but CO's is generally thought of as better.

That is the big difference. Much better.

I kinda already see how this will play out when they to cut over to SHARES. If AA is smart during that period they will be there to grab passengers.

If AA is smart, they will eliminate the DoT's ability to track on time flights, cncls, IDBs, and lost bags.

http://airconsumer.dot.gov/reports/2...cemberATCR.PDF

(most recent data published).

A carrier should concentrate on where they are lagging the other competitors to acquire new customers vs trying to capitalize on a possible future issue that another carrier may have trying to integrate. One should compete on the product you can deliver, not on fear mongering on a competitor.

Most of the premium brands of the world never advertise anything about their competitors, rather, they elevate their own game to a high level, then advertise it. Like WN, back before they decided to compete in big money airports, had a great on time %. They advertised it, hyped it, even had jokes "Why doesn't WN have little bitty planes daddy? Well son, they always pull out on time." about it.

My opinion is that if AA wants to try to grab other airline passengers, they should 1st get their own game in order, then try to win customers based on superior performance.

But then again, that's just how I would try to make a premium brand name for myself, by offering a long term premium/quality/reliable service/product vs try to make short term gain on a temporary possible shortcoming of a competitor.

What I don't get is: When they were doing their cost analysis, did they consider GA and call center labor? Especially during irrops, effectively every ticket sold becomes unprofitable because of the amount of time required to rebook each ticket. 20 minutes of agent time is not cheap, and they must know this, not to mention customer ill-will when it takes hours upon hours to rebook an entire plane.

There must be one hell of a cost difference between the two systems overall for them to put up with the difference in labor costs to operate.

It's official
 

No longer just a rumor: news just moved over the financial wires

http://www.tnooz.com/2010/12/23/news...nsition-to-hp/

Funny you should trot out these numbers. Have you actually really looked at them? AA mainline only really sucks on cancellations. That's it. In all other categories including on-time arrivals, baggage mishandles, customer complaints, they are hanging right in line with CO and your beloved UA. And I may point out that CO and UA do FAR worse on IDBs.

American eagle also sucks, but the carriers that CO and UA outsource their regional flying to suck even more in almost all categories.

So please enlighten me how AA is behind CO and UA in total.

When you guys say SHARES is bad, does that include its GUI front end or just the TPF part? Doesn't CO have other non-TPF / PC tools that interact with SHARES to do things like auto-reaccomodation, etc.? Don't the TPF parts basically do the same thing on all these systems?

From a passenger's perspective, I think it is really cool CO's website can let you see where the plane is from and the upgrade list. I also think the gate display for CO is more informative than UA's.

I guess that UA and AA probably have the most sophiscated systems - that was the culture back then. It comes down to measurable cost/short term benefit nowadays, unfortunately. Customer sat and employee frustration is less measurable.

Eagle. scroll to the bottom of your IDB (the carrier that denies many more via ratio than any other carrier.) Isn't Eagle a part of AMR?


So yes, in ontime, AA is worse than both UA and CO. Close to CO, but worse and not quite as close to UA. But my post was a reply to the fact that someone says that during IT integration, UA will have issues (and it might, it is realistic.) THe poster implied that AA could capitalize on this. My point is that any integration issues are going to impact most likely less than 1-2% of the total passengers. Well, 1-2% is alot, and I grant you that, so how much worse that UA in on time is AA? Over 3 %.

Include over 3% "late" by DoT definition, throw in the fact that AA cncls about 80% more flights by ratio, and you have lots more stranded/misconnected passengers. COmpare that to the possible impact of reservation intigration by UA and CO and I say that AA doesn't smell like a rose, and shouldn't expect that they will gain significanlty by this, rather if they want to gain by saying they have better performance, they should concentrate on getting better performance instead of hoping that the people with better performance might fail.

Strive to make one's self better, not to hope someone else fails. That's how most people train in any competitive field. You can't count on other's failure as a given, only your own performance is within your control.


Make sense to you now, the context my post was in (i.e. a reply to grahmpros who thought that AA could use IT integration by UA/CO to tout that they don't have issues, when in fact, they have every day issues that disservice more than the other majors?)

Does this mean the end of instant ticketing when you book on line? On UA you hit "purchase" and if there's nothing wrong with the reservation about 30 seconds later you have an e-mail confirmation with your ticket number. I've heard when booking on CO it can take up to an hour or longer before the ticket is confirmed and issued.