mh3265a

You should have flown thru NRT after Fukushima....had C in a 747 nearly to myself. That was incredible!

boss315

Anyone want to take the betting line on OP-ups?

chinatraderjmr

That's what was so surprising. Y was pretty full, C was empty & F was myself & 7 employees (2 in uniform).

UA-NYC

The NERVE of you to sully Employee Class!

schley

This sucks big time for me. Saudi Arabia just changed their weekend last month and it is fri/sat now. That screwed up my vacation plans then this. I don't know what will happen next. Used an ecert for the flight and now hoping to either get it back or figure out a routing maybe the DXB flight. We shall see.

chinatraderjmr

Muslim weekends are ALWAYS Friday & Saturday.......I am not an expert on the KSA but the Weekends have been on Fri and Sat in Dubai as long as Ive lived there (and Oman, Qatar and Bahrain as well......cant imagine KSA would be any different

UA-NYC

I seem to recall for some reason that KSA was Thu/Fri

gpicur

UA is not thinking through the commercial viability of this route. Yes, the military/government is drawing down. But the oil sector, especially in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia is ramping up big time. United was making some nice in-roads to attracting Oil folks in Saudi, but I suspect that they were psyched out by Emirates, Qatar and Etihad, which offer a nicer products and service. UA had the best service for Saudi Aramco employees with depatures from BAH at 21:30 and arrivals in IAD before 7am. This was great timing !

This route service reduction does not surprise me, but it is disappointing. UA was already cancelling this route on average about 3 times per month.

If attracting higher paying passengers is the path to profitablility, United has missed the boat !!!!

"Muslim weekends are ALWAYS Friday & Saturday" You are correct in saying that you are no expert. In fact, weekends vari throughout the Muslim world, and until last month were in FACT Thursday and Friday in Saudi Arabia.

Looking back, believe it or not, the UAE, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait weekends were also Thursday and Friday through at least 1998 and perhaps as late as 2001. Yemen and Afghanistan also celebrate their weekends on Thursday and Friday.

But it does not stop there. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan has their weekend on Saturday-Sunday as does Mali.

Think good, long and hard before you contradict the wise sage Schley. He takes extraordinary care in posting and his information, and as far as I have found, is ALWAYS spot on.

FC ORD

It looks like the IAD-KWI/BAH will go Mon, Wed, Fri, and Sat with the return on Tue, Thu, Sat, and Sun.

I found it interesting to see UA suggesting business/first routings of IAD-DXB on UA followed by DXB-BAH on FlyDubai, since FlyDubai only has economy.

Shareholder

Fortunately my MR fights to/from BAH haven't changed in November, but checking the seat map shows the flights are virtually empty so it's no wonder UA has cut back on frequencies. And UA has been selling seats for about $750 ex-LAX/ORD. I just wonder how long UA is going to keep flying this route. It has to shrink if nobody's buying seats to certain destinations.

LAX UA 1K

Not true. The traditional weekend in the GCC countries was Thu/Fri. Qatar (and I recall some of the other GCC countries) used to have a split system where government observed Thu/Fri and private observed Fri/Sat. Qatar changed to all Fri/Sat summer of 2003. Oman changed earlier this year and Saudi just announced that they would join all the other GCC counties in making the change. Saudi gave less than one week's notice for the change.

According to this article, Yemen and Afghanistan are the only countries remaining with Thu/Fri weekend.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/06/25/...s-the-weekend/

chinatraderjmr

Not to mention Fly Dubai is a LCC operating out of T-2 in DXB......There is no easy way to transfer from a main line airline to Fly Dubai. Im not even sure you can check baggage thru. I guess that could change as I just saw an add in the Gulf News touting Fly Dubais new "business class" but as of now, Fly Dubai is no different then South West

But the real question is this......EVERY AIRLINE, including EK has been told they MUST cut their service down at least 30% by next summer (due to the closure of one runway at DXB) Even airlines such as UA with one daily flight are not exempt. LH has a daily flight from FRA and one from MUC. To comply with the directive, LH will only operate MUC-DXB 3 days a week (with the other 4 days operating MUC-AUH) I wonder if UA will go to 3-4 flights a week from IAD-DXB and leave it at that or if they will fly to AUH the other 3 days??

perhaps my wording was a little misleading but I did say I was NO expert on KSA so could not speak for them. (In fact, Im no expert on anything except perhaps Dubai) The weekend in Dubai has been Fri and Sat since I moved here in 1999. Of that I am sure of. But thanks for the info on Pakistan....I spend quite a bit of time there (unfortunately) and had no idea the weekend was Sat and Sunday......I'm quite surprised. All I know is I cant even get a cracker at the Sheraton Karachi during the day over Ramadan.....Very strange for a Western Chain. I just moved to a building in Dubai that is half hotel and half serviced apartments and am quite happy that even during Ramadan I can order a beer from room service (Though my GF found out the hard way last week it is not advisable to sneak one to the pool this time of year

mecabq

Iran too. Qatar has toyed with the idea of changing to Saturday/Sunday, much to the chagrin of the Wahabbists who dominate society. Not likely to happen.

I was in Abu Dhabi when they changed from Thursday/Friday to Friday/Saturday in 2009; it benefitted me greatly, as we got a three-day weekend on the change-over week. (Of course the change was announced only several weeks in advance.)

Kurt

The travel advisory can't be good for business. I checked the load for IAD-KWI tonight: 18 of 40 booked in C with ZERO on the upgrade waitlist for Y to C.

bldr1k

It is (was) different.