fragment54

Do PMUA flyers think SHARES always acted the way it has been acting recently or do you guys realize that whatever happened on 3/3 seriously damaged the effectiveness of SHARES?

I still think the problems with SHARES can be partially attributed to a "silent protest" by PMUA agents, but clearly there are numerous problems with the coding that haven't been addressed. I am just surprised that a lot of PMUA flyers seem to think that those problems always existed and that PMCO flyers are just used to our reservations messing up at least 50% of the time. Not attacking PMUA's reservation system at all here and I'm not completely blaming PMUA agents for being pissed (I've dealt with PMCO agents who are equally unhelpful).

hobo13

Prior to a couple months ago, I had no idea what SHARES was! So how would I have any idea how it used to perform?

All I know is that it's not FastAir. And honestly, I probably didn't know much about FastAir either.... and that's the way it ought to be!

An airline's reservation system is like the offensive line in football...... you only hear it's name called when it doesn't do its job!

sbm12

It also didn't replace FastAir. :-:



Unfortunately there is a small but vocal group who repeatedly insists that PMCO was a podunk airline that ran a half-assed operation with a fraction of the planes, destinations and options that PMUA did. None of that is actually supported by any factual evidence, but that doesn't sop the haters. Such is life.

UA767400

Prior to the merger I did not experience any problems with SHARES as I was a CO and UA flyer. My guess is that the system cannot support more than it did prior to CO.

hobo13

Fine. Apollo. Whatever. Just keep proving my point.

The OP seems to admit that SHARES is not performing well post 3/3. Do you agree or disagree?

entropy

United used to run an airline the size of the combined United+CO on Apollo back around 2000 when they were this big on their own.

SHARES has never been great for much other simple single-carrier itins. It has been known to routinely drop OAL segments.

bob_the_d

i think something actually went wrong which broke things.

i used to fly CO for years and quite honestly, whether it's CO, codeshared, partner, whatever, my reservations weren't lost, ticketed in a couple minutes, miles showed up in a couple days, so on and so forth. i can't speak to if it's easier to use or not than fastair as i'm not an agent, but at least for me my experience as a consumer is that for all intents and purposes the thing worked.

these issues being reported seems odd to me. i don't mean to say people aren't telling the truth, but i mean it's strange that it's happening. it seems like they changed the codebase around and managed to break it. i'm sure a lot of people on here will say that it's just me being used to worse service or whatever hate is trendy here this week but i've never experienced any of these glitches before the merger. maybe it's not perfect, it's not the most efficient system and it might not be the prettiest, but it seemed to do what it needed to do. not sure what happened.

then again, i just made my first post-3/3 purchase last week and that reservation seemed to still be fine. ticketed in minutes, GPU worked online, seat assignment sticking... so who knows. no opinion yet (not until i finish flying it at least), just a data point of what's happened to me so far.

sbm12

Which point? That you don't know the difference between the systems like you said above? Or something else?

There are certainly things that are still broken. I don't actually know how much of it is SHARES, how much of it is the ancillary systems and how much of it is agent training. Based on that I'm not particularly willing to say that anything is broken. I like actually having some factual basis behind me when I make claims like that.

I've ticketed and flown a number of itineraries just fine since 3/3. I've also had a few that didn't go right, mostly due to Verified by Visa killing the transaction online. I've also looked at the company's reported stats for March and the numbers suggest that on a broad scale they are still flying most of their planes at a quite reasonable on-time and completion rate with very high LFs. In other words, there isn't much evidence of a massive failure for the core operations. No doubt there are still things that need to be fixed, but the core operations actually appear, based on the stats, to be running reasonably well.

hobo13

And again, I don't really care if its SHARES, an ancillary system or an agent's training. And I'd wager that 99.9999% of the flying public doesn't either. But apparently it is important to you to establish that it is not SHARES.

donFlier

Am I interpreting this article incorrectly, or was SHARES launched at the merger?

http://www.businesstravelnews.com/Bu...hnology&a=mgmt

hobo13

That the customer does not care about the back-end systems. They just know when things don't go right.

bob_the_d

well in all fairness the topic of this thread is kinda about shares...

CO ran SHARES pre-merger. UA ran APOLLO. they transitioned everything over to CO's SHARES infrastructure. the go-live was 3/3.

sbm12

Yes, I do see value in actually have a discussion based on what is factual rather than random flights of whimsy.

Note, however, that I have not said SHARES isn't the problem. I've said that there are a lot of moving pieces and we don't actually know.

SHARES has existed for a long time. CO used it for a few decades (and other carriers have, too). United wasn't using it. At 3.3 they launched a new instance of the system and migrated everything from both the legacy CO SHARES system and the legacy UA Apollo system into the new single platform.

hobo13

And I've said that I don't know how SHARES performed prior to 3/3.

Let's get back to the original question:

Do PMUA flyers think SHARES always acted the way it has been acting recently or do you guys realize that whatever happened on 3/3 seriously damaged the effectiveness of SHARES?

I am a PMUAer. I tried to give the OP an honest answer to his question. I actually believe that many PMUAer's feel the same way.

I'm not sure why you insist on ridiculing me. It's very unbecoming of an expert and prolific FTer such as yourself.

UA-NYC

I knew it was bad, just not this bad. In my 60K BIS on CO post-*A entry, pre-3/3, I observed:

- mileage UGs still waitlisted even when R space became available
- extreme difficulty w/OPSC getting failed upgrade instruments posted back
- generally slow mileage posting, esp. for *A flights
- holding back EUA seats
- knew ticketing wasn't instant - but it didn't take days for partner flights to ticket
- knew the agents were just generally slower - LOTS of typing