The problem, though, was that anyone could cut the line when UA's crappy IT processes got stuck.

The flight shows R > 0, and anyone applying an instrument will confirm right away--whether or not there is anyone currently waitlisted. This has been confirmed repeatedly by experience and is why asking an agent to remove one's waitlist request, then reapply it, works every time.

Taking away R visibility will not fix this problem--it will only hide it so that waitlisted pax don't notice anything other than their upgrades not clearing. :mad:

So they can sell the upgrade instead.

Ding Ding Ding...........We have a winner!!!!!

Now the preview site is back online. Still showing fare buckets.

Hi Everyone,

I can certainly appreciate the feedback on this particular topic. I’ve responded to a fair number of PMs tonight and I do want to at least offer a bit of clarification here in the thread as well. I know there’s no explanation that will make the current state better for those of you here. But, at the end of the day, the way in which the information was shared was truly causing issues and confusion for an extremely broad audience. This is what drove the change. This information displays for all customers and there is no ‘expert mode’ setting as there was on the previous site. So, turning it off, as a first step, really is helping mitigate a large volume of issues that our front line co-workers and other customers are experiencing.

Getting this information back into the hands of the “right” users is our next step. As many of you have suggested, the solution lies somewhere between adding this information as an option in a profile setting to providing even more detail in much smarter ways. I would never couch this as a “change we expect anyone to like”. I can appreciate that it’s seen as a take away. We are committed to making this information more robust and useful though – especially for our expert travelers. I know it can't happen quickly enough.

Shannon

<cue cricket sounds>

Everyone with an ounce of sense has left UA..Not worth the hassles anymore.

Too late folks. RIP UA...

let me be the first to say, I don't beleive you. its all about selling upgrades. You want to monatize the seats, and information was reducing your TOD sales.

you have lost me as a passanger, and I am not the only one. DL will appreciate my 50-60K in yearly spending, and I will appreciate the better service.

So why can't you keep this visible just up until the time the on/off feature is added? It seems like the dissonance this is creating with hundreds of loyal customers is not even remotely worth the tradeoff.

Prices, seat assignments and destinations are also very confusing and cause problems for UA personnel and customers alike. Perhaps remove them from the site for clarity. Would be easier for SHARES to manage as well.

Very well put, especially the metaphor for UA management's ethics and incredibly short-term perspective.

Exactly.

What were the issues? What was the confusion? And how in the world do they outweigh the hassles this change will generate for many customers, not to mention for the poor UA CSRs who will have to field many more inquiries and much more passenger frustration?

Shannon, I know that you are just doing your job, so please don't take this personally. But this move is garbage and so is the rationale for it.

Reminds me of the change to SWUs/GPUs lasting a year from when someone hits 1K - another lousy change supposedly in response to customer experience and preference. Except this one is much more egregious.

While I was never optimistic about the direction UA is going, I'm still surprised by this move. And I'm more confident than ever that we'll see yet more of this kind of garbage.

Being a business person, I can clearly understand the challenges with a system integration and unexpected issues/delays that arise from such an endeavor.

However, this is very upsetting to see UA act in such poor faith... particularly at this juncture where UA service delivery during this past year has been clearly sub-par. This action clearly is most impactful to UA's most loyal customers (namely, people like me) who travel often and utilize these tools to maximize benefits of our loyalty.

I would never criticize UA's objective to maximize profits. However, doing so by taking actions which seriously damage already fragile relationships with your bread & butter customers is not a prudent business strategy.

So you mean to tell me it's easier to remove the 10 lines of code that currently make this display than it is to add 1 column to the user profile table, a checkbox on the profile page and the 1 line of logic to check if the user has enabled the setting??? Whomever is running your web division should be fired on the spot (should've been months ago). This is seriously something that any skilled .net programmer could implement in a matter of minutes. I'd do it for free and I'm sure sbm12 would too. This continues to be insane...

Let me be #300 who is extremely disappointed with this decision. It is customer unfriendly on so many levels.

1. It isn't easy to call into UA if you live abroad and this will be extremely inconvenient and could be costly in many cases. Why take a convenience that is available on the website and make it less transparent and inconvenient?

2. I use KVS and it seems many use EF, but I have had to rely less on that and use the grease monkey script to search for upgrade and award space on UA. If the information is going to not be available on the UA site but on KVS/EF then you are forcing customers to pay for information that you used to make publically available on your website. If you cut off their access, then I and many others will be forced to make a decision on whether to stay with UA as this information is a MUST for "expert" flyers.

3. Why take away this this information if it is only available in an "expert mode"? It can't be the confusion to customers argument since the default is not expert mode. If one has to go into settings and set it up for expert mode then I would think that customers are protected from confusion. Pulling the information for 3rd party uses I feel is the business decision here after examination.

I have remained with UA through this transition, but showing fare buckets is best practice for us "expert" flyers. Taking this away will limit transparency on how upgrades are being processed as well as limit our pragmatic selection of flights for optimal clearing of those upgrades.

Big, Big, Big :td:

I'm not going to threaten to leave yet, as I'm not sure if KVS will still show this, but if this information is only going to be available by calling I will have to rethink my loyalty. Who knows what information the agent on the phone is actually showing and sharing is accurate anyway.

Thanks for the post. We really do appreciate having someone from UA willing to be part of this community. As far as this issue goes, why turn it off before you have an alternative??? If this was really a problem, then it would have been seen a while ago with enough time to put into place an alternative for us power users. Something just does not make sense with your explanation.

Also, why is it that UA seems to relish doing things that hurt its most advanced fliers? The 1MM take aways are a big example. The degradation of the Global Services program after 3/3 is yet another (though that is getting a bit better recently). Making GPUs expire 1 year after crossing 100K miles vs expiring at end of following year is another stupid thing UA has done to piss of top fliers. Piss of the kettles is one thing. But doing things you know make your top customers mad? That just makes no sense.

+1

There's always a choice. UA decided to screw us over on this one, instead of adding a setting or the ability to display the info properly, decided to proceed with no solution.

Your spin on it, frankly, is BS. I have to believe you just tell us what you are told to tell us as a matter of corporate strategy. (based on this and past announcements by "bad news Shannon".)

-David

What a load of hooey! Sometimes you have to wake in the morning and be able to look at yourself in the mirror.