I'm so over this. What a piece of crap airline.
Thank God for that AA status match.

UA Insider,

Add my view to this being a huge backward step. OK, so the reasoning is people abusing the info, and potentially causing you IT/Revenue issues, I cant see how it can possibly be confusing people - unless the click the little link, they dont even see it!

To solve all these problems why dont you:

1) make it available either (a) only for elites or (b) only for logged-in members
2) once it's only usable when logged in, if you suspect any members of abuse/excessive queries, then suspend their MP accounts.

This solves all your problems (confused users, abuse, screen scrapers etc). If this is what UA is working on, can you confirm this with an approximate timeline?

Thanks

UFO

I am currently in IST. Flying on an H fare from FRA tomorrow. Using the workaround I see the early flt has 1 R seat. I go to the UA Service desk in IST and they say they don't know how to do a SDC (within 24 hours) and they don't know what a GPU is. They call the help desk and they don't know. They transfer to GS even though I am on,y 1k and they are closed.....

I hate this airline. I can't do any changes on the UA site and I will now probably try SKYPE.

OT I am on the TY lounge..it rivals the Emirates Lounge IMO. It's amazing.

Or limit to people who have previously done at least 5 online bookings or have flown 100k miles. There sooooo many ways to get around this problem.

Everything just seems to be getting harder with the new UA !

It occurs to me that "expert mode" was one of the very few nice features that was brought over to the PMCO web site from the PMUA site. Perhaps SMI/J just discovered that they adopted something good from PMUA and wanted to put a stop to such behavior immediately?

No you don't. There is still the option to search online. It isn't as easy, but it is still there.
All 6 hours??
The GS desk is never closed.

Are you trying to change your IST-FRA flight? If so that won't work as SDC only applies to UA-operated flights. The UA folks in IST are contract employees handling one flight a day. Hardly a surprise they don't know things like SDC which would never apply at that station.

This seems to be an issue off conducting business with transparency vs. being opaque. The usual motivation to be opaque is to hide dishonesty or manipulative behavior. It seems that the United management is choosing to treat its customers in ways that they want to hide and this change by removing fare class information helps them be dishonest, immoral, or manipulative.

It's also possible that they're simply trying to hide their incompetence. Recognizing that their upgrade systems are such a convoluted mess that they couldn't make them work right if they wanted to, they're now trying to sweep the evidence under the rug. They perhaps hope to return to the glory days at CO, before they added all those annoying UA people, when they could just claim that everything was perfect and people would blindly believe them.

Is this Russia? Whats the opposite of transparency?

The poor business decisions coming out of this group of Executives should not surprise anyone. They can't help themselves. Ignorance is bliss.

Just got the email from EF about the removal of R and ON. Way to go, UA

In my heart I think this is all about hiding the shenanigans around GPUs and cash upgrades. Happy to see there's a workaround posted which means it will still be exposed for what it is by FT... I nominated this thread for Talkmail.

Agreed. I give her credit for "facing the music" when she delivers bad news.

That she is only the messenger is underscored by the fact she told us that when the fare buckets were pulled down, there would at least one new feature added - which to this point, hasn't been identified, AFAIK.

She's just the messenger.

And if you've decided that you need to take something back, have whatever alternative you intend to offer in place and ready to go.

As someone who has flown CO for over a decade, I can assure you that it is neither incompetence nor does the system work incorrectly.

This convoluted mess is exactly what they intend.

CO always prided itself on "dynamic valuation," and the complexity and opacity of their upgrade process (which is now the UA upgrade process) is intended to retain as much of the upgrade inventory as possible and to value it as dynamically possible (which is corporate speak for making upgrades as hard to get as possible).

I'm not really sure why allowing Ma and Pa Kettle to see the R inventory is such an issue (Shannon never really explained that), but this move certainly fits into the standard CO policy of making the process a series of "smoke and mirrors" so that the customer doesn't realize the rug is being pulled out from under their feet at the company's whim.

United, why is your management so harebrained? I reckon they are still living off the "route network" and "787" (which by the way, even Ethiopian Airlines got before you) mantra. No visionaries. Just tinkerers who make things more complicated for marginal increase in revenue. Your management will never come with anything truly revolutionary, just more of the same small brained thinking.

If you do not want to give UDU or RPU or GPU or remove the elite program, just say it. All this blather about reducing *abuse* of the system just smacks of incompetence. At least I should thank your management team for pushing me into the arms of American. I am enjoying my travels with them these days.

The most ^^^ post of this thread - this in my opinion is the current state of United operations.

Ha ha...

The issue is not information.

CO dba UA is happy to provide you as much information as possible, whether accurate or otherwise.

What they don't want to do, is to give you information that makes it more difficult to price their product dynamically, i.e. sell ToD's in the case of upgrades by--among other techniques--dynamically changing (reducing, increasing) R inventory as they deem necessary to maximize revenue.

Also, they won't be honest about doing this, because the carrot, the promise of GPU, is a powerful marketing tool that attracts customers to spend money with UA.