SFOPhD

To be fair, some UX is better than others. They are after all, different companies. There are some that I abhor flying, and some that I think are just as good as mainline in terms of both operations and customer service.

Which ones have been particularly awful in your experience?

bocastephen

Government controlled infrastructure is just that - government controlled. It's not something UA manages or can manage, or even successfully influence. Because it's a fixed influence, you need to adjust your operations around it, not set your operations according to a specific target, experience problems because of the fixed influence, and then whine about it after the fact.

On-time performance is just one small slice of the overall problem - just like the 787 is not the dose of medicine that will fix UA. How does government controlled infrastructure affect customer service delivery quality, technical problems with SHARES, catering downgrades, TOD upgrades, etc?

boss315

This is not a problem about individual flights posted by FT members: the problem is two-fold. First, combining two cultures without a concerted effort to provide human relations and customer service training is like mixing a bunch of chemicals together willy-nilly and hoping that the result is something great......or you get and explosion of toxic goo. UA got the goo. They looked at saving pennies here and there when they should have been looking at the big picture of what saving a cent here or there would do to their CS issues. Second, UA didn't fully survey the aircraft fleet for age and condition at integration and then proceeded to run routes as if the aircraft were new....result was delays and cancellations.

They can't fix their problems until they deal with the CS issues and fully train people in human relations and service skills and set definite expectations for performance from all staff. And until leadership leads by example, this will be hard to do. Until the aircraft issues are addressed, the operational problems will continue and the discussions on FT will continue ad nauseum

bob_the_d

expressjet's E145's are awful. they're always delayed. they're cramped. it's a miserable travel experience all around.

i forget which company it was though, but whoever runs the E170's from ORD-NYC i've always found to be pretty acceptable. when i fly midday and can't get a widebody i usually fly that little bird, and it's surprisingly not bad. would the 752 be better? sure. could it be worse? yeah, it could be an E145.

oh. and whoever runs those CR2's. awful. just awful.

meanwhile i've had a couple recent runs on AA's CR7's and got upgraded a lot. the FA's i've had were all really happy. the service was good. and on some runs they give you full meals (cold meals like a chicken salad, but still full). service wise it's been night and day for me. in the regional world though, i'm hoping the addition of UX's E175's will help ease things a bit.

spin88

Have you ever bothered to figure out what those taxes are used for? Airlines pay the same fuel taxes everyone else pays, same sales taxes, and general taxes. The only difference is that air tickets include three federal,landing fees, security fees, and airport fees. Why?

Well the FAA and its money for airports and customers is PARTIALLY FUNDED by three federal taxes, a 7.5% tax on tickets, a $3.90 per segment tax (+ $8.60 for AK/HI flights), and a $17.20 international departure/arrival tax.

These fees do not cover the entire aviation budget, and general tax funds are used to pay the rest.

Then there is a 9/11 security fee ($2.50 for segment) which pays for MOST of the TSA (or contractors) but that is also funded in part from General Tax Funds.

Finally, there is an airport facility charge (which goes to pay for the airport buildings, etc) which is a maximum of $4.50 per passenger. This also does not pay the cost of airports, and the FAA is giving some of its revenues (some of which comes from general taxes) to airports for capital improvements as a result.

Now you can get all Tea Partied up about this, but the indisputable FACT (and we know FT is about Facts ) is that aviation taxes at this point don't pay for all of the costs of commercial aviation, which in turn is funded in part from general tax funds (income tax, etc).

No offense, but I don't see why the rest of the economy should be taxed more to subsidize airlines. But that I guess is what you are advocating.

Its the worst kind of special pleading (and is based on a total lie) by Jeff. If he wanted to be honest, he should say "hey, UAL is not making enough money, and while the tax payer is currently subsidizing us indirectly, we want MORE subsidy" And then he can propose where to get the extra money for his bigger subsidy? Perhaps borrow it from the Chinese? Cut school lunches for kids? Hey, he needs to get his pay back up to the $13.9M it was in 2011, so perhaps seniors could give up some of their social security to help that happen?

We all need to dig deeply into our wallets to help poor suffering Jeffie out...

PV_Premier

IMO/IME...

Shuttle America ~ Republic > GoJet > Transtates ~ Chautauqua >> Mesa > Skywest ~ ExpressJet ~ Commutair

No experience with Silver or Cape air

Andy Big Bear

Republic, Republic, Republic, oh and, Republic.

bob_the_d

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...x-carrier.html

looks like silver air isn't going to be UAX anymore.

fly18725

I think the airlines, airports, and their associated trade groups would disagree that you can not successfully influence the government regarding policies that impact their daily operations.

Nevertheless, perhaps you could provide some insight into how UA and other airlines with significant operations in the congested NY area can adjust their operations.

Having fewer IRROPS to deal with is the best way to significantly improves the customer service experience. That said, there is absolutely room for improvement in many areas the customer experience.

I think you need to accept the fact that SHARES, unbundling, and monetizeation of the travel experience are here to stay.

Andy Big Bear

Extremely well thought out post. UA could use a little lesson in customer service from Marriott, IMHO. Marriott defies the "excuse logic" that a huge conglomerate of different properties and products can't achieve a consistent customer experience. Marriott achieves it consistently, or at least I always feel like a VIP when I stay with them, even though I'm not.

bob_the_d

when i stay at a park hyatt in asia or europe as a diamond member or a W or westin as a SPG platinum, it's great how well they treat you. if they treated me at the same levels that UA treats me in BF (even at a hyatt regency/sheraton level) they wouldn't be getting my business. i'm not sure why i put up with it on an airline. it's not like there's much choice either on the hotel side, there's 4 or 5 major hotel networks too. but they seem to do a much better job.

channa

I agree with you in principle, but I think you may be a bit ahead of the game here. So long as they can't execute, there's no point in addressing the front line.

Their systems and processes simply cannot support good CS. They need to dig into those before addressing the front line issues.

Look at my bag issue posted above in Post #2. They wanted to intercept our bag to help remedy the situation, they failed. They wanted to expedite our bag on AA to help me out, they failed. They wanted to compensate us for the trouble, they failed (partially). All good intentions, all in my best interest, all fumbled. It was one thing after another. I still have an interim expense claim pending, watch them screw that up too.

And this is no different than any other service issue with UA. They want to rebook me, but it takes them half an hour or more to do it, they do it wrong, or whatever.

Fundamentally if you break down any of these failures, it boils down to systems and process. I like digging into this stuff to understand it. Great agent wants to reroute a bag, says do this, but the message doesn't clearly come across to the bag guy who writes the tag with a black magic marker. Well, that's a technology failure -- ideally, they would approve the reroute in the system, and the new tag would generate.

The rep who agreed to cut two vouchers explained that she has to get approval from a supervisor then call over to 1KCS to cut the vouchers, during business hours, so if you call after hours, they have to put a note on their calendar and call in the morning. Again, where's the workflow? Ideally, they'd file the request immediately in the computer, and if another department has to process it, it would be in a queue of some sort.

Same goes for a rebook or reroute -- they have to put it in, then type all those commands to reissue it or calls the Helpdesk, which in turn questions everything and sometimes decides to veto the plan. I wasted a ton of time earlier this year on one where the agent and I agreed on a DL reroute due to a misconnect, and when the Helpdesk got involved, they told the agent they could not do DL because there was an earlier US flight. They spent significant time booking me on US before the agent terminated the call and informed me of what they did. As soon as I knew, I told her US was not acceptable since it was delayed, and it would be a CLT misconnect. She had to pick up the phone and get the Helpdesk to reissue the flight to the DL flights that were vetoed and deleted a few minutes ago.

Until they remedy their ability to execute on situations, front liners don't have the support they need to provide good CS, and IMO, Smisek is using them as a scapegoat.

spin88

Well, we are all still waiting to hear from you on how UA's "savvy" (your words, not mine) management team has improved UA... still waiting for you to post the good things they have done since taking over (that other airlines don't do).

But having been unable to answer that challenge, I would note that the "fix" to NYC is for airlines to be charged the same amount for every slot regardless of plane size, or bid for slots. As long as an ERJ-145 pays 1/6 of the landing fee as a 777 there will continue to be misuse of landing slots.

If the NYC airports figure out how much they wanted to raise, and divided it over the landing slots, or auctioned off the slots, it would push the airlines to fly bigger planes, which would benefit EVERYONE. There should not be any erj-145s (or small corporate jets) at EWR sucking up landing slots. If someone wants to use that take off/landing slot, let them bid for it or pay the same for it, so as a scares resource its properly allocated.

bocastephen

How long do you think it's going to take the government to add new capacity at EWR/JFK/LGA? Let's try over a decade or more, and the capacity increases due to NexGen are not going to be enough. Basically EWR would need to be rebuilt or the NJP buried under it, for starters.

So what is the solution? Reducing frequency is the only option. That means cutting back on Express flights and up-gauging other flights to reduce frequency. Unfortunately neither UA nor its competitors has the correct fleet mix for that right now, and they bowed to consumer pressure for more frequency while ignoring the fixed limitations of airway system capacity.

So, that leaves us with improving internal processes to better handle the IIROPS that do occur because of fixed capacity limitations. What is lacking in this process is robustness and flexibility - in short, the system should be constantly and automatically monitoring connection/cancel risk for every passenger, sorting by priority (elite tier, fare paid, etc) and auto-rebooking or auto-protecting on the fly as needed to ensure a seamless transfer for the customer.

Stuck overnight due to an at-fault issue - the system should auto-print hotel/meal vouchers to be claimed at E-Service machines by affected passengers (and provided to GS/1K automatically regardless of delay fault). The baggage system should show current location/status of bags during a delay or forced overnight so a passenger can access their reservation online or by phone and determine where their bag is.

That is just scratching the surface - but unfortunately UA selected a last-gen IT system that limits flexibility.

mre5765

From the airline pilots forum:

"This contract allows the company to fly 743 RJ (255 70/76 seaters) up to 120% of our single aisle aircraft's block hours!!!

We only get the good deals if the company busy a new SNB [Single-aisle Narrow Body mainliner], allows us to fly it, and puts it in service before the end on the contract. [...] This was just an expansion for them. This is a horrible deal for our pilots. "



UX planes turn around faster, de-boarding, cleaning, re-boarding, fueling, de-icing, frequent "apron" positioning. Besides which, many of those mainline customers have a UX segment on their trip.