GBadger

I switched from DL (DM) to UA (1K) recently and have been really happy based on the 37k miles flown in the last month. Some highlights of the comparison:
- More complimentary domestic upgrades on DL than on UA
- More E+ seats on UA domestic flights than DL
- Miles are usable on UA, including one-way awards, last minute bookings, etc.
- Upgradable fares using GPUs are still not obscene in price (at least not when compared to DL)
- Did I mention that the miles are usable?
- Service is comparable on both airlines, IMO
- There is a lot of confusion within UA right now (agents included) about what is/is not allowed and who gets what benefits. This has been the biggest headache for me.

I'm not looking back at this point -- I just have to figure out how to burn through my remaining 600k SkyPesos...

Passmethesickbag

Found myself on a DL flight recently for the first time in years (had some orphaned Skymiles and put them to good use for a r/t NRT-ROR instead of the cumbersome UA connection through GUM). Inflight service was unremarkable, but the NRT Skyclub great and the aircrafts spotlessly clean. Anyway, I was quite amused and rather impressed by the very smooth corporate branding stuff which almost seems to invite a pointed comparison with Continited. The inflight safety video starts with Richard Anderson at the founder's desk, talking about their core values of honesty, integrity, and mutual respect, and more or less paraphrasing Bob Six's famous common sense credo. The CEO's introductory spiel in Sky Magazine is a dialogue between Richard Anderson and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft about "how the evolution of technology is impacting their business and you". Whether or not this is a clever and conscious broadside in the direction of UA and Smíšek's leadership, what a contrast! I imagine that if Hemispheres were to print a dialogue between Smíšek and the CEO of the company that set up their IT platform, it would have to involve a medium and a Oija board.

TWATWA

Except that the leadership of Delta supports the flying of old planes, those 767s to Europe are old, grumpy crews across the Pacific, and the worst mileage program of the old legacies. These products do not bode well for their leadership just as I feel like UA's new leadership is subpar as well.

cfischer

in another < 12 months all 763 will be retrofitted with the 1-2-1 lie-flat seating they have on the 764s. In all honestly, the Delta 777, 764 and 333 (IMO) are FAR superior to the terrible 2-4-2 seating on PMUA aircrafts. If I can't get myself on a PMCO 777 with 2-2-2 seating, I am booking Delta for sure. Don't get me wrong, there are many things over at Delta, which are not good ... compared to the current situation at UA, however, Delta is far better.

sxf24

The grass is always greener.

The Delta forum relentlessly criticizes Anderson's video and C.E. Woolman's desk.

Alpha Golf

Jeez, I would take jeff's video over Richard's faux-folksiness and faux-humility any day. (First best: Gordo)

BigPoppaCO

Steve Ballmer? HAH!

cfischer

honestly, I think both are stupid. Who cares about a 30 second video? It's all about the service and the product and United is falling further and further behind Delta if they don't start a massive campaign to upgrade their ACs. In terms of CS, I never wait more than 30 seconds on the phone w/ Delta and Email responses generally take less than 24 hours. Contrast this to 30+ minutes wait time on the phone and 6+ weeks for a simple email inquiry @ United.

DHalltheway

+1

Is your experience for prior to March 2012, from March 2012, or both?

TWA Fan 1

I have been flying quite a bit of DL the past two years and, generally, I'm very happy with it.

Yes, customer service is far nicer and more responsive than the increasingly common indifferent treatment one receives from CO dba UA. What I especially dislike with CO dba UA is the propensity of customer service agents to constantly blame the customer for any problem. It's truly off-putting and has left a bad taste in my mouth.

With DL, they are so much more reasonable and friendly, it's truly a pleasure. In December, my kids flew to SFO as unaccompanied minors. I pre-paid the UM fee when I bought the ticket, to make the process of checking them easier for Mrs. TWA Fan 1 at JFK.

When she got there, the record was apparently not clear, so Mrs. TWA Fan 1 was forced to pay this fee again.

On the way home, though, the agent at SFO noticed the fee had been paid twice and she gave my son a print out showing the fee being paid twice.

I called the DL 800 number, a stateside agent picked up on the second ring. After a brief explanation of the situation on my part, she not only acknowledged the fee had been paid twice, but apologized, and, as a gesture of goodwill, credited me both UM fees.

Can you imagine that on CO dba UA?

halls120

+2. You want to see an excellent in flight safety video, fly AA.

DanTravels

So I'm pondering whether jumping programs from DL to UA is such a good idea after all...

Long ago and far away (2005), I flew United a bunch and had uniformly bad experiences. Late flights, mis-connects, UA calling and asking if we'd mind taking totally different flights, agents standing on counters and screaming at hordes of passengers (no, I'm not joking... but well, it was PHL, which may say something). It all drove me into the waiting arms of then-partners NW, CO and DL, and from 2006-2011 I was a Platinum, only dropping to Gold this year because I stopped flying while my wife was on bed rest with a high-risk pregnancy last year. I'm still a lifetime lounge member.

Last May, she and I did a round-trip to NYC CO/UA, and again there were misconnects outbound, customer service for non-elites was virtually non-existent, and the EWR-HNL non-stop had bad turbulence all the way across the continent. So her first impressions of UA were pretty bad as well.

But then... UA (well, CO) did something good, and started offering direct flights between ITO and places farther away than HNL! (LAX x7, SFO x1). For a while, DL competed on price, so as someone who'd been elite on them for a while, and on NW before them, I figured I'd still fly HA to HNL, then fly them. No biggie. But DL didn't think to compete on proximity or convenience of routing by actually flying to ITO. And eventually they got tired of competing on price, and went back to being their usual high-priced selves.

So I started thinking I should just take the more direct routings on UA, through LAX or SFO. After all, fewer connections and shorter durations aren't exactly bad things, you know? And plenty of colleagues fly them - our Director is even UGS - so I'd just need to build status on UA, no biggie.

When it came time for work to fly me to New York twice within a month (taking my wife and baby along on the first outbound, letting them stay with my folks near NYC, and bringing them back on the second return) I didn't have the money to book it all myself (with a single PNR for the outbound and return, and a nested itinerary back for me in the middle), so I let the flight coordinator at work (a position I held for some years, so I know how dangerous what I'm about to say is) book both of my round-trips through EXPE, and then booked (here comes the dangerous part) a separate itinerary for my wife and the baby, matching up to my first outbound and second return, also through EXPE.

UA had nice prices on 103/781/1172 EWR-LAS-LAX-ITO on the way back, so I put us all on those flights, adjacent seats, etc. But of course, this is UA. So of course, they rebooked us all. Only these days, they don't even call to ask if it's okay.

Wife and baby got rebooked EWR-IAH-LAX-ITO, with a 33-minute connect time in LAX. Plenty of time for a small woman carrying a baby to make her way out of economy class on an arriving flight, probably change terminals, and get onto the next one, right? Uh... how about no. As my wife eloquently put it, "They do not realize this does not whatsoever help dilute my current negative attitude about the airline."

So I called EXPE to see if that could get fixed ($DEITY, I wish my Elite Plus with them hadn't lapsed due to that break in travels!) and got an agent who responded to things like "UA103, UA781, UA1172" with "Can you give me the flight number?" Eventually, I had to explain to her that UA has EWR-LAX nonstops, and give her a couple flight numbers as examples, and she was (ever so slightly) enlightened.

Then I asked about my routing. Still EWR-LAS-LAX-ITO, but oh, they'd changed me to an earlier LAS-LAX to make the connection at LAX less tight. Great, right? Well, except for this:

Agent: "So are you okay with your new flight leaving LAS at 1:55pm?"
Me: "Sure, but how long is my layover?"
Agent: "Your layover in LAX will be two hours..."
Me: "No, the one in LAS. If I arrive at 1:38pm, and leave at 1:55pm, how long is that?"
Agent: "Um... (thinks really hard)... seventeen... OH."

Yes, boys and girls, when your airline policy requires pax to be at the gate 15 minutes before departure, you may want to leave more than 2 minutes for them to get out of economy class on their arriving aircraft and make it to the gate for the departing one. What gives, UA?

Anyway, in about an hour and a half on the phone with EXPE, UA conceded that they had changed both of our itineraries to include connection times that were at best unreasonable and in all likelihood impossible, and we both wound up rebooked onto an EWR-LAX nonstop. Victory!

I'm having a really hard time giving either UA or EXPE much credit for any of this - as far as I can see, all UA did was let crack-smoking spider monkeys from Mars run their rebooking system, and all EXPE did was hire front-line agents who struggle with difficult concepts like "arrival" and "departure" and "layover." All the actual legwork of identifying alternate flights that actually solved things instead of making them worse had to be done by me - good thing I'm an FT-er with a background in the industry, I guess?

I've already got ~20K miles booked on UA this spring, and my wife ~10K. Soon it'll be time to book another ~42K of summer travel for me and another ~25K for her. So even without status matches, we're looking at Gold for me and Silver for her by September, if we stick with UA and its partners and don't run screaming from the horror of flying UA non-elite.

Should I stay? I've already explained to my wife that if it weren't for my status, Delta would treat us like subhumans too, but can someone here tell me "It gets better" when we make silver, or at least when I make gold? Or can I expect to wake up the day before our return flights and find that UA has arbitrarily rebooked us again, this time onto Air Koryo?

aacharya

What burns were my eyes, from this chatter, especially past the 2nd paragraph - and I read regulatory filings for a living.

Suggest to clean this up and start over. From what I see the computers made an itinerary change that wasn't doable.

Many of us see that as a good thing - as the sky's the limit with rebooking.

WhyUnitedWhy?

Don't even consider it. I'm 1K and on my flight yesterday I didn't even get a seat assignment! They were down to middle seats and 2 crappy windows. And that's for 1K.

My theory is that they wants us all to leave because 75% of passengers on every flight are "premier" and every premier line is as long as every other line. And since the air crew for some reason feel they need to go to the front of the premier lines, you actually end up waiting longer than the normal lines.

(Hint: if you are going to the front of the line anyway, DON'T DELAY THE PEOPLE THAT FLEW 100,000 MILES TO PAY YOUR SALARY. Use the regular lines.)

It's great that they board 1Ks first, too, but 100% of the time since that started, they announce the other tiers so fast that unless you want to wait at the gate an extra 15 minutes and fight for position to get on as a 1K, you don't actually get any preference.

cfischer

Both, but it's worse now. Before it was 3-6 weeks for a reply, now it's 6+ weeks and no reply whatsoever. Calling used to be o.k., but even as a CO Plat I sometimes waited 20+ minutes until I got an agent. On Delta this never happens.