wow...just when I thought it couldn't get worse
 

How about putting one of the "type the following weird looking sets of letters" when you wanted to look at fare codes? Wouldn't that keep automated scraping?

OR...find a fix before your remove the feature so you don't piss off all your premium customers!

I guess I'll just have to spend countless hours on the phone with your reservation folks now rather than check online. What a waste of resources. Great job.

Putting the expert mode loss into perspective: 11 years since united connection loss
 

When you see references to "CAPTCHA", that is what is being described.

Thanks...you learn something new every day. CAPTCHA

And as this thread sinks down the page, there is clear knowledge in Chicago that they got away with it, and can start planning the next change that "I think you'll like."

It's Monday morning and I'm still pissed off. Gonna start thinking about an open source tool to mine the information still on the website regarding upgrades. Should I succeed, and should people start using it, that will be the next thing to go.

You brought a tear to my eye sir with wonderful memories of a great product from a (then) terrific airline.

My only point is that you are still guessing and that, despite thinking that the information you have can guide a better decision you really have no idea if the alternate choices would have worked out or not. You're playing a very asymmetrical game and claiming that the results are useful. I don't believe that's true.

You say that Z9 R0 is more likely to clear than Z3 R0 is more likely than Z0 R0. My question is how often you've bought all three and actually compared the results. Until people start actually doing that sort of thing pretending that these guesses are better for that data seems quite a leap of faith to me and one I'm not inclined to subscribe to.

Maybe the Z0 flight has a few misconnects or people cancel while the Z9 flight suddenly has a group booking up front which swings inventory in a way RM wasn't expecting.

I'd like to think that seeing more seats for sale probably means better chances of an upgrade, but without data it is quite hard for me to state such as fact with any integrity.

No. I wish the data were still there, though not for predictive reasons as described here.

That's as likely to happen as them not using SHARES anymore. If you think about it this is a similar rollout to customers as SHARES was to employees. Let's reduce the readily available information. If you want to access the same information there are more convoluted ways to do it.

Let's pretend they did run it by some folks. Do you think any of those folks would have said, "Wow, this is AWESOME!" when hearing it? Of course not. So do you think that the folks on the UA Insider team would actually believe they'd get any useful feedback? If they already know that everyone is going to hate it - and they're pretty smart folks so I believe they did know that going in - what difference does it make to talk to those same people in advance.

In the very first post they acknowledge that they know it is going to piss people off: "I know that this is a popular feature for many of you here – in fact, we liked it too." And yet they made the change anyways. So either they're complete morons who have decided to lie for a living or it wasn't actually their choice.

Remember that they're just a few folks in one department at the big company. If they simply acted on what was posted here FT members would get priority on upgrades and only ever pay G fares, even if there's no inventory. But that probably doesn't work so well when they go into a meeting with the revenue management folks. I have to assume that this move was a similar situation. the Customer Experience team can scream and yell in the meeting that some customers are going to be pissed and post a lot on FlyerTalk, but if the RM or Call Center or Marketing managers agree that the change has to happen then the change will happen.

Just because a bunch of folks here (self included) don't like the change doesn't mean that it is bad for business.

This is the last straw for me. I'm done.

This is the issue. Like other notions (religion) out there based on faith people here have anecdoctal experiences and whether "provable" or not they choose to believe them. If you are not inclined to subscribe to it, don't ..but on the same token if you can't prove that those people are incorrect, don't try.

First falsehood in UAI's statements on this subject bolded above.
I'll take the bolded answer, Alex. Yes, final answer.

Dave

I'll take the bolded answer too.

Are you saying that RM/IM is no better at predicting flight loads than random chance?

I haven't made it all the way through the thread, but if anyone from UA is reading this, please consider enabling the feature for various elite tiers and up. i.e., 1K+, GS+ or whatever. This change has effectively rendered useless a couple of benefits that are made available to GS members - namely those that allow us to request an agent to open up certain award/upgrade fare buckets when other classes are available. Program is feeling more and more diluted every day and it is truly disappointing.