SFOtoORD

No, it really is not professional. UACO is not advising them to be saying these things so they should keep it to themselves. You all complain about consistency of service on UA...this is part of the equation...rogue employees who are out and about doing things their own way.

colpuck

As much as Halls120 and Friendlyskies want to deny everything, shares has a higher level of functionality and is cheaper than APOLLO. While it may take some time to learn the system, it is a change that people will like.

entropy

I don't complain about any UA inconsistency... UA is able to do things at the airport in seconds that CO could only dream of. I appreciate the heads up .

channa

And honestly, this is my biggest fear.

Not that it won't be learned (it will), but using this commandline approach is prone to errors (make a typo or get the syntax wrong, and it won't work, and you have to look up the correct command).

Again, not insurmountable, but IME, what this translates to on the CO side, is a downgrade in customer service. An agent who is looking at a huge line of customers is more likely to say no to a reasonable request because of the time it will take them to handle it. Why bother trying to rebook the customer on AA in an hour when the customer is already reprotected on CO/UA in 8 hours? Especially if it will take 15 minutes of clumsily clunking around with SHARES commands to get it to take?

Bonehead

Not only does Co.com take e-certs, but it also allows the use of canceled reservation credits when booking new ones. I couldn't believe the lack of functionality on .bomb regarding the latter.

star_world

I suspect that "deathly silence" will be the response to this from the usual suspects. There is an agenda to be furthered after all - balance doesn't come into the equation.

Bonehead

Sometimes I think that I'm in the "P/R" version of the United forum, what with the illogical, agenda-driven fervor that permeates many of these discussions.

I just posted in another thread that after a year of flying UA almost exclusively I have come to the conclusion that UA FAs are not as customer-oriented as CO ones*. This is not agenda-driven; it is an observation that has become especially apparent with the PDB-refusal fiasco. I would be more than happy to report otherwise, but sadly, I cannot. I wonder how many others posting on this forum have as much experience on the two airlines as I do in the last several years? Some no doubt do, but I'll bet that I'm a fairly rare bird.

*I have met some excellent UA FAs, and some indifferent CO ones, of course.

WineCountryUA

previous debates on SHARES vs APOLLO/FASTAIR

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/conti...st-merger.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...ares-isnt.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...o-cio-now.html
and others

dan1431

I was passing through BWI a few weeks ago and needed to do some ticketing on the UA side, I was talking with the Ticketing Agent and she said that SHARES is going to take some getting used to it, could she handle it, most likely, it is just going to be difficult at first without a question.

She explained that the ticketing issues that I had to have corrected is a fairly easy process in the legacy UA system, but much more labor intensive in CO's SHARES system.

Dan

N1120A

I have a sick feeling that I'm going to get a lot more "I can't fix this in 5 minutes" like I did from a CO CSR at the LAX elite line. Only this time, he can't send me back to United to fix it in 30 seconds.

Actually, part of professionalism is honesty, and that is what Halls got.

Yes.

You are kidding, right? Higher level of functionality? Not when it comes to doing what CSRs really have to do, like reissuing and rebooking. FastSHARES would have made this much better, and Fastair/APOLLO is better still.

UA.bomb has its definite foibles, but its better than CO.bomb in other ways. For example, finding confirmable upgrade inventory and using upgrades. It also has a much better multicity search function. It is also much less cluttered. That said, I doubt you get many PMUA loyalists here who don't welcome some of the features of CO.bomb.

Anyway, the website has little, if anything, to do with the GDS.

FriendlySkies

Well, with all of the evidence here, why do you continue to defend SHARES? It's an older program that requires much more work for simple issues.

UA-NYC

+1. If after all their years with the wonderful SHARES program, CO agents still take fare longer than UA agents doing similar tasks - isn't that proof enough?

njcommodore

Such as?? There's a reason they call UA's website .bomb . You'll never see references to that in the PMCO side.

sbm12

Not really. The difference is that it doesn't have the FastSHARES skin on it, not that it is worse than Apollo. That's coming soon, though a bit later than desired, and it will certainly help things. But knowing that the UI skin is coming it is foolish to bemoan the underlying system as so bad. Because it isn't. There will be some training/growing pains, just like it will take some time to get wifi deployed or the CO planes reconfigured for e+. Nothing in a merger like this happens instantaneously. And once all is said and done there is no reason to believe that the long-term functionality of the system is going to be significantly limited based on one underlying technology versus the other. Certainly not to the extent being bandied about here.

I'm not saying that SHARES without the UI is going to be faster or better than FastAir. But I am saying folks are comparing different things and not looking at the bigger, long term picture with most of these comments.

halls120

Where did I ever claim SHARES wasn't cheaper than Apollo or had less functionality?

The sole question I've raised in this thread is why COdbaUA is adopting a system that is less efficient. You know, more keystrokes per transaction equals longer transaction time.

If you are going to criticize my posts, please have the common decency to state my position correctly.

Thanks!