There was a PDF posted before 3/3 that was for the travel agent community. It was an official UA presentation. Among the talking points - 40% of the combined carrier MileagePlus members came from CO and 60% came from UA.

So at least as far as United Continental Holdings is concerned, UA was bigger, by a sizable margin, than CO.

Here is the posting referring to the PDF: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/18029939-post683.html

The link is no longer working, however. :(

new glitch?
 

I have the return flight EWR-Europe this evening. Yesterday I listed for a mileage upgrade (20k miles plus either $250 or $300), and my cc was charged.

Subsequently the wait list entry showed just under the main entry.

Expertflyer indicated 2 seats available for mileage upgrades.

Today when I checked in I did not the wait list entry, and I was still in coach. However if offered that I could buy-up to Z for about $515 (this was from an M Fare), which I did.

Is this normal? How difficult will it be to get the wait list fee refunded?

I posted about this problem last week. After check in I was not added to the upgrade standby list. It sounds like you had a similar issue. I PM'd UA Insider and she had the staff look into it. IT sounds like I'm not the only one with the problem. You should PM UA Insider about the glitch.

In terms of getting your money back, others have reported issues getting it back in a timely manner. You may need to call and request it from UA. If you can't get a satisfactory answer, I highly suggest you just file a chargeback with your credit card co.

I'm still waiting for a refund on a double-charged change fee of $150 from early March. United has been tone-deaf to me via e-mail and phone. Eventually just contested it with Visa. What a waste of time and energy. I hope your experience proves more reasonable. IME UA is having issues even getting the basics right.

Thanks I will send UAInsider a PM with my PNR on this glitch.

Good post. Thanks for the perspective. Agents seem more informed on the phone now than two weeks ago, and even on the ground, there seems to be more support staff to help agents who are not yet adequately trained.

Fed up - taking a timeout from ua
 

I've had it with UA and I am scheduling my next 3 weeks of travel (including overseas) with Delta. Yes it's true, I will be giving up some of the better perks that united gives, but I can't afford the time it's taking to resolve issues at UA.

I have a long list of issues, but in addition to the time I am spending on the phone with them every week, I am just plain sick and tired of hearing the word "no" from phone agents. I seem to always be getting United agents in Chicago instead of Houston. PMCO, I rarely heard the word no. The culture of customer service was soooo much stronger. On many occasions PMCO could find a way to make things work. UA seems much less flexible and willing to accommodate.

My main complaints are the following.
1. Missing miles, I can't book rewards tickets for expensive overseas flights, so this is costing me!
2. No reply to customer care issues (lost luggage/delayed or rescheduled flights).
3. FA's with couldn't care less attitude.
4. Lack of training on Shares (for example took 20 minutes to get a seat changed at the airport). IMO, this was and is the biggest problem and it doesn't seem to be getting better.
5. Complimentary and instrument upgrades process is broken.
6. Time on the phone. flying 4-6 flights a week with a broken united.com I often need to call. While I do get through quickly, the time to resolve the issue is averaging 40 minutes.

So I am taking a short break, and I hope at the end of May things will be fixed.

I don't doubt your own experience, but it struck me as ironic that mine has been exactly opposite. I much prefer the Chicago agents, who have always been quite helpful to me. The only time I ever heard "no", followed by "you can't talk to my supervisor, and there's no address to write to for an appeal", was from a Houston agent when I was a newbie Plat with PMCO.

That said, I'm sure the PMCO agents are much more familiar with SHARES than the PMUA agents, so it's quite likely they'd get things done faster.

If you mean by mileage program membership, UA may have been bigger, but the mileage program database doesn't even run on SHARES :confused:

The fact is, in 2009 in most measurable respects, UA and CO were very similarly sized airlines. And anyway, I haven't seen anyone post on the forums problems of scalability that would be implied by doubling the workload.

Scalability issues would be SHARES crashing under a large load or major system slowdowns. Neither of these occurred (although some on this forum feared them). In fact, it seems SHARES, as a technical platform, scaled just fine as would be expected - it was built to scale to this size level.

Almost all of the major problems with SHARES relate back to three problems:

1) Poor user interface - not an issue with SHARES per se.
Apollo didn't come with a built-in UI either, and native Apollo was just as messy as native SHARES is. UA wasted time trying to port FastAir rather than developing a UI for SHARES and here we are now. It's not an inherent limitation of SHARES, rather a political decision about UI development strategy at UA

2) Untested interconnects between SHARES and other backend systems
Basically, the major issue on the consumer-facing front is syncing with the MileagePlus database. This isn't a SHARES issue, but a testing issue. More time/better testing would have resolved this (and hopefully eventually will!)

3) Less well developed airport control processing
This is actually a limitation of SHARES and relates to how upgrades can be processed. In the grand scheme of reservations systems functionality it's a relatively minor part, but obviously has a major impact on elites and so is discussed a lot here. But again, it's not an issue of scalability. And if UA were willing to spend the $$, I'm sure they could get HP to upgrade that part of SHARES.

SHARES does/did have some advantages over Apollo - for one, the company that maintains it is willing to keep maintaining it! TravelPort wanted to get out of the business of running Apollo so it wasn't even clear who would maintain it post-merger. HP has a large enough customer base so that this isn't an issue with SHARES

A second advantage is that SHARES can store all ancillary purchases in the PNR much more easily than Apollo could. Not of much use to elites that wouldn't buy it anyway, but useful to the airline.

In the end, the technical differences between SHARES and Apollo are relatively minor and any deficiency of SHARES at a system level can probably be fixed for the right amount of $$. The chaos of the post-merger era are mostly flaws of technical migration and political choices by UA, not problems with SHARES.

It appears there are still issues with losing seat assignments.

I received a seat upgrade message via email and attempted to log on within the past 10 minutes. The website would not log me in, despite several attempts with the correct FFN and PIN. I had to access my reservation through the PNR to choose the seat assignment.

When I returned to the itinerary listing to check to see that my seat was noted in the record, I noticed that the seat for my return flight was -- rather than 21B as I have had for the past 3 months. Fortunately, I was able to get the seat back on this VERY FULL flight! I certainly hope that this does not mean I'm going to have to babysit this reservation to make sure it doesn't drop out again. :td:

Well i've had good/bad experiences this week
Monday: 2 hours of website downtime
Tuesday: ~6 hours of downtime
Wednesday: Now ~6 hours of downtime thus far today
...all downtime during prime business hours

On the upside it appears my waitlisted GPU for the 23rd appears to have automatically cleared.

I would say with all the bad press going around, UAInsider has been relegated to only posting official press releases. The interactive and almost-candid responses have been cut off I am sure... They would rather communicate via United Hub where it is the official controlled information channel.

This open communication on FlyerTalk I imagine would be a huge PR risk for them.

Missing Credit
 

Same here. We flew FRA-SFO-LAX on 4/5 and still no credit. Also missing credit for a Turkish Air flight from IST-FCO on 3/31, but maybe that's not UA's fault. The funny thing is that I had an LH flight from FCO-FRA and Lufthansa credited me within three days.

I was wondering about this as well. Seems UA Insider interaction on FT stopped at the same time UA sent out their "apology" email. (March 30) Last UA Insider post was March 28. Last update to the main post of the system integration thread was March 31.

They can communicate however they want, but seems rude to ask
FTers to submit issues and examples, then not keep updated on progress.

I wonder if anyone has had any interaction with UA Insider in the form of PMs?

both were shrinking due to the economic
 

downturn. But United was much bigger on passenger miles. 35,000 to 50,000 bigger.

Rank Airline (millions)

2010 2009 2008 2007
1 Delta Air Lines 266,990 161,904 199,895 178,952
2 American Airlines 201,881 196,939 242,987 231,330
3 United Airlines 164,662 161,436 204,706 197,684
4 Emirates 143,660 118,284 100,672 90,530
5 Lufthansa1 129,671 123,083 126,267 122,672
6 Continental Airlines 128,141 125,048 149,845 137,712