UA-NYC

- UA already had zoned boarding - it's not that difficult...except for SHARES
- There was a single upgrade bucket that had dynamic waitlisting, so none of this sweep nonsense, nor the TODs that have become pervasive
- *A flights didn't have issues posting, and if they didn't post, you could request online easily
- I'm guessing CO agents could pick up a point and click GUI easier than UA agents can memorize command line syntax, but what do I know

There are clear differences, and it's not too difficult to infer things wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Hiccups, sure, but not this. I do love all the attempts to downplay the issues though, it's amusing.

halls120

First and foremost, I want to see outbound and inbound flights together on the same page. Do that, and I could live with the ugly design.

sxf24

I agree this is a nice feature. Hopefully UA will include it in their new website that should come out some point this year.

Until then, I guess we'll have to suffer the unmitigated disaster that is navigating to another page to see the inbound flights.

halls120

Of course, I never said the web site was an unmitigated disaster, did I?

In fact, here's what I said in my opening post on this thread.

How did you get "unmitigated disaster" out of that?

neo_781

I think another thing that people are forgetting was that SHARES supported more of the policies that the new UA wanted to base its program on going forward.

colpuck

Really. With the old UA site you had to guess and check your flights to get the lowest fare.

With the new UA site, you select the outbound you want it site tells you the price point and then you get to select the return either at that price or higher. The UA site was a tease it would show you great routings, but not the price.

sxf24

Sorry, I meant that to be facetious. I hope your sense of humor wasn't lost in the SHARES transition.

UA-NYC

Or - you could search by price, and it would default to the lowest fare for you. Or, you search by schedule to give you time flexibility. Or, you did the flexible dates option and got a nice matrix of day combinations. It was nice.

My fare on a 3 country UA trip looked good today, until I got to the third set of flights and found the price for UA metal was actually $4K higher, and it was only a single set of Copa Flights that had kept the price so low from the start (not desirable to sit in a 737 trying to go from GRU to NYC). That was sweet.

RhoadWarrior

To your first point, AFAIK six of one and half a dozen of another. Whichever system was chosen would require training of the "other" company.

To your second point, this is probably one of if not the largest technology conversions in the world. I believe it is the largest of any in the aviation industry. I'm in IT, I don't work for the airline and there are plenty of dimwit things I could complain about regarding the former United and Continental systems. The fact that any of this worked on day one is simply amazing. It takes time to shake out problems. There are foreseen problems they might not have been able to address or needed to be addressed post-conversation for a variety of reasons. Then there are bound to be problems that were simply missed or not anticipated.

I consider myself lucky that I'm not traveling right now and my co-workers that were/are traveling weren't seriously affected by problems. All I heard from my co-workers have been minor complaints.

I am sure there have been many IT people that have gotten very little sleep in the days leading up to and after the conversion. I have been in this situation myself and give everyone involved kudos for pulling this off. Well done!

halls120

those kind of posts are best used with a or a , especially given the raw nerves on FT over the last few weeks.

sbm12

But not identify all the options at the lowest fare. It might be that only the 6am flight is the cheapest when I clicked that option on the old UA site, or it might have been that there were several options. But until I checked them all it was impossible to tell.

Just out of curiosity, was that GRU-NYC part the third segment of the trip? If so, was the information displayed during the search wrong? Or just that to get the best fare you had to choose a different option on the last page which had its price also clearly indicated?

Also, would using the "United Only" checkbox have made the search more appropriate if you weren't interested in partner carriers?

mduell

Try counting RPMs rather than destinations or enplanements.

Shorthaul to every village with 4 people and a chicken in LATAM isn't equivalent in terms of global footprint to longhaul to Bangkok, Dubai, Osaka, Sydney, Bahrain, Singapore, Kuwait, Melbourne, etc. I'd call it... regional.

ORD4R

This is true wisdom. Keith Halbert would share his opinion if he wasn't given a 3 million dollar package with a non disclosure, so he would not discuss the situation. Warning both Simsek and then the BOD cost him his job but he does have the satisfaction of being right and a 3 million package.

kb1992

In all fairness, lot of PMCO's traffic was directed to 2nd or 3rd tier cities in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

For example, there are a bunch of Japanese cities served by PMCO from GUM on those fabulous 737s. Not many people even recognize these towns.

Not to mention those narrow body 757s to some 2nd tier European cities that require extra fuel stop west bound during winter at times.

OTOH, UA serves major global cities such as SYD, SIN, KIX, ICN, TPE, MEL, BKK. DMI with wide body 3-class aircraft.

Yes, PMCO looked like a glorified regional carrier compared to PMUA.

hobo13

Did you never realize that there was a 'search by price' button? It listed all the lowest price option.

Pretty sad that somebody of your experience never noticed that added functionality. Many of us PMUA's would have been happy to help you learn about that, but alas, it's gone.