smashr

I'm a long time 1K flyer who has mostly switched to AA due to the upgrade and soft product cuts at COdbaUA, but decided to give UA one more shot last week. It moves me close to 50k for gold, and figured I would give them one more chance to remind me of what I am missing before I book the year's remaining (pricey, international) travel on AA.

On this 4 segment trip (2 in each direction), I was only on 1 of the 4 original flights, and arrived at each destination ~4 hours late.

Flight #1 (UA1733 DCA-IAH 8/6/12): Went mechanical, and eventually departed ~7 hours late. I was sucessful in switching to UA1728, which was supposed to leave 83 minutes later. It boarded on time and I would have made my connection in Houston had it not sat on the ground for 30minutes waiting for Weight and Balance numbers!

Flight #2 (UA1017 IAH-SJC 8/6/12): Was still at the gate along with the gate agents when I arrived, but they told me they could not let me on. There was at least one other 1K passenger on my previous flight in the same situation. I was eventually rebooked ~2.5 hours later into SFO, and, in a fit of irony, this flight sat on the ground for an hour waiting for connecting passengers!

Flight #3 (UA425 SJC-DEN 8/10/12): Was, perhaps miraculously, on time, and arrived early.

Flight #4 (UA936 DEN-IAD 8/10/12): Was on the same physical aircraft as UA425, which made it especially surprising when, after boarding, they declared that there was a problem with the fuel system! Rolling 30min delays turned into multiple hours before they gave up and decided to switch to a different aircraft for a ~5hr late departure. I managed to switch to UA607, which would have gotten me home _only_ 3 hours late, but it sat on the ground for ~45min waiting for the gate agents to clear up seat duplications from so many people switching to this flight.

keloutwest

Sounds about right.

BearX220

Operational performance more important than upgrades? Absolutely. Domestically I am now booking US instead of UA, with no hope of E+ or upgrades, because I have no more faith in UA operations. I have to go IAD-LHR-SEA in a few weeks and I'm booking AC via YYZ/YUL over more direct UA routings for the same reason. My time is more important than a slight shot at extra comfort, and I won't risk UA unless it genuinely doesn't matter when I get there, which is rare for me.

Mike Jacoubowsky

Yuck. I hate to spoil the party, but while I don't have that many reference points this year (just 20 segments), not one has been cancelled, and I think today's flight, delayed by 14 minutes, was the most-delayed of any.

Flights out of SFO, IAD, DCA, MSN, FRA, IAH (a couple LH in europe which, ironically, were late but I don't think they count).

My luck may be about to change. Upcoming UA#960, which has got to have one of the worst TATL records out there lately. What's with that bird? Consistently 45-60 minutes late. Thank goodness for FlightAware, so I could schedule my train connection appropriately.

endrond

Fwiw, I think only 1 of 20 flights that I or my wife has taken since 3/3 has had a major problem. And on that one my wife got a $250 voucher for being willing to show up to the airport a couple of hours early when UA anticipated that her later flight would be cancelled.

But I assume I'm just lucky. I think someone posted gov't statistics here which made UAs recent operational performance look very bad, in a variety of different ways.

LEONIDES

And here are the stats to bank this up:

http://newsok.com/airlines-with-the-...le/feed/417048

They are running at a 78% clip. That's the worst of all the mainline carriers. Heck, it is worse than most discount carriers.

Upgrade percentage matters. Ontime performance matters. Hard and soft product matters. It all matters.

grahampros

And to the OP don't let one trip be your only data point. Most of us who have traveled to any large degree have had the same thing happen as a one off on any of the airlines.

I'm not defending UA here by any means, but a one bad trip any airline could do that. Rather then your experience, look at the overall recent data and decide from there. And of course it depends on where your flying to/ from as well. Connecting all over the place to avoid UA when you have non stops on them probably isn't a wise strategy either.

Syzygies

Hey, at least your flights went. There's nothing like waiting out weather for an arriving aircraft, and using an iPad weather app to watch the storm completely clear the departure airport, only to have the crew time out and the remaining legs cancel. The slack (or lack thereof) in crew scheduling is a purely economic decision.

chinatraderjmr

Just wondering when a real journalist will ask Jeff about these things instead of the "puff pcs" I keep seeing on CNN, etc where they just let Jeff go on and on about building the worlds largest, greatest airline blah blah blah & no hard questions are asked

FlyWorld

Problem is that the media needs advertising dollars. United is worth much more as a friend than as an enemy to a publishing organization. I think this is why we have not seen any real press.

UA-NYC

This actually downplays the performance of the past few months - it's getting worse in a hurry. I won't be surprised though if August improves a tick, as it's pretty hard to go lower than 64% (unofficial July stats).

vivamuci

UA905 IST > EWR is delayed at least 1 hour every day since its inaugural on July 2nd. Aug 6th and 7th UA905 did not operate at all.

UA904 inaugural from EWR touched down July 2nd two hours late with the blue Tulip paint. Found it interesting choice of aircraft considering it was the inaugural flight.

I saw UA landing while I boarded my BA connection to LHR to connect to AA. It felt really strange when I finally saw UA touching down in Istanbul as for me I chose UA since 2000 no matter the fare. Sad. But happy with AA and TK.

gene2632

I am still recovering from the shock of this past weekend...4 segments, all few on time and arrived early.....pure luck on my part. EWR to BUF on 8/9, my 10am was the last flight of the day that was not canceled or seriously delayed. Yeah, I know the weather was an issue but .....it does get tiresome.

reddirt14

I have felt your pain. I too have a similar record with UA this year. It's an impossible airline to plan anything around. You never know when you'll get there, but more likely than not, it will not be the scheduled time.

I am frustrated by so many poor management decisions that have a negative impact on my flying that I've pretty much left. I've got maybe 12,000 more miserable miles booked out on UA from early bookings, but everything else will be on UA. United will get a total of 45-50,000 miles from me this year and AA will pick up about 100,000. And I'm a money bag flyer for these airlines. Short hops (majority under 500 miles), $500-1,000 tickets. It's crazy to let that stuff go in my opinion. Oh, well I'm not running UA into the ground and at the ned of the day, I've got to go where the service is. AA is taking great care of me and honestly if I was starting at zero and really looked hard at the airlines, I would have chosen AA now. But at one time UA was clearly better, in my opinion. Those days are long gone.

smashr

I've certainly had my fair share of irregular ops on United and other carriers over the years; I'm no stranger to it. If one half of the trip had been fine, then I could have easily written it off as a fluke.

Perhaps most egregious in my mind was the 30min wait for the W+B numbers for my (rescheduled) first flight. That speaks directly to their systems performance, and ultimately caused me to miss a connection I otherwise would have made.