March 3, 2012 - integration day for SHARES res. system.
 

Was chatting with a CSR today about .bomb, and was told that March 3,2012, is the date when UA migrates to the unified SHARES system to be operated by PMCO and PMUA.

His/her advice was, and I quote, "you might think twice about flying us for a few weeks starting March 3rd."

A CO phone agent told me the same thing today as well.

What a professional response from the CSR. :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Perhaps it wasn't a "professional response", but from everything that has been discussed, I might agree with her recommendation.

That's my birthday...

and I have a trip planned 9 days later... Happy birthday to me...

I hope (in vain?) that UACO do thorough testing... surely you can do lots of dummy tests...

I love how you think outting the CSR's gender will lead the draconian UA mgt to trying to track "him/her" down. This isn't going to effect 90+% of us. I'm sure there is going to be a lot of training and testing between now and then, let's try to be optimistic that most of the hiccups will be worked out. As long as the NE winter doesn't stretch into March (massive disruptions/IRROPS) we should be ok.

In exchange for a few UA vouchers, i'd like to think UA would hire Flyertalkers to do at least some of the testing. We know the website in and out from basic to advanced and while not UA employees, probably care just as much about making sure it goes live with as few snags as possible.

^^^

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Excellent!

That doesn't matter. The CSR is some random joe on FT, he or she is a company employee and needs to be professional. Not to mention its one of the all time classic UA customer service issues is that UA has way too many lone wolf customer facing employees.

Not to mention, what does this CSR actually know about the transition? No doubt it will be challenging, but I doubt this person is the expert. The CSRs should keep it to themselves and save the griping for the break room.

Perhaps this agent has begun "SHARES training" and has seen how well or poorly they and their colleagues are equipped to handle a non-Fastair system?

Honestly I don't see why this is such a big deal. UA should just hire a bunch of travel agents with 20+ years experience as temporary workers and let them handle booking and reservations for a few months -- surely if you can handle SABRE, it's no big deal to learn another res system.

Its highly professional, a good rep will advise customers of possible issues arising from their itinerary (such as a tight connection).

Awesome I have 2 UA flights on March 9, 2 more on March 10, 1 on March 11, and 2 on March 12.

4 more on March 17 - UA flights booked as CO flight numbers :D

This is gonna be fun :D

Does the current CO.com take e-certs? Or will they need to figure out a way to accommodate those?

We're also not all informed of the entire context of the conversation.

If a CSR that I knew or had held a lengthy discussion with said that to me, I would not a problem. We all know that there will be plenty of complaints from folks once the new system is in place, why would not want honesty? I think customer service has to be based in some sort of honesty....

I think weather it was professional or not is much more gray than folks are making it out to be. It would be much different if said CSR was in a terminal sharing the comment will all pax.