LaserSailor

Isn't this just because of all the UA pax on MX at IAH?

"Now youse can't leave......."

JC5280

Agreed. While I can understand the facts about losses, an article based on the information from a flight attendant is, well, about as credible as some of the threads on FT.

uastarflyer

Correct. It is substantially on the mark.

The entire BOD needs to be gone yesterday.

But dissing the Tapas box was a bit overkill (exaggeration) in fairness. It is pretty decent.

You have so many valid points, don't overplay the hand and damage credibility, is my advice to the author.

oopsz

...but those of us who travel a lot depend on it. I can't be dark for an entire day flying eastbound from LAX or SAN. (I realize we were all incommunicado on flights up until a few years ago, and that some people like the quiet oasis of being out of touch, etc. etc... but this is 2014 and I just can't get away with it any longer. My clients would scream).

Even if paid uptake is 6%, if you have wifi, it drives (price insensitive) business travelers to your airline. UA shouldn't think about it in terms of the paltry $50 a month a frequent flier pays for an unlimited Gogo pass. They need to think about it in terms of differentiating their product from the competition. It's a cabin amenity like lie-flat seats - recliners are much cheaper but if you only have recliners, travelers won't pay for your product.

And the fact of the matter is, substantially all AA flights have wifi, and very few UA flights do, and that's part of the reason why in the past 18 months my ratio of AA to UA flights is something like 40:1. And I was a multiyear CO platinum elite prior to 3/3/12.

LaserSailor

This just affirms the business case against a monetized wifi. The sliver of people who need access 24/7 but who can't afford to fly private are vanishingly small and won't carry the load for the rest.

Once people try gogo for anything serious, they realise how stupid it is other than text email.

halls120

If I am flying during working hours and have the option of Wifi, I'm always going to take the airline that offers it. It is a huge advantage to be able to attend to e-mails for five hours so that when I land, I'm not dealing with 60+ e-mails.

dank0014

+1. The fact that there are some trips that takes an entire day of work out, I need to have wifi. I don't care about a 1-2 flight, it's the 4+ hour flights where being able to get from point A to B while also knocking out multiple emails is important. Also, our company uses all web based tools and systems, so we require an internet connection to even be able to build out our analysis of information for our clients. Given I can visit 2-3 clients a week, I don't have much time at a hotel, between being on site and then going to dinner with them, to be able to finish up presentations and such.

FlyerTom111

What bothers me is you have brand new planes with some of the worst interior decisions I have ever seen. It's like buying a top of the line Tesla and then having it come with cheap plastic bucket seats and no interiors.

The planes that have Wifi have no power outlets so if it is a transcon, I die a few hours into it even though I paid for a whole trip of wifi. On the planes with DirectTV, I can pay for that and I can plug my electronics in, but there is no wifi. United's product is all Jeff'd up.

UA-NYC

It's more like buying a 2014 Tesla with a 1991 Taurus interior, style-wise

FlyerTom111

United has given up on competing with Southwest, Virgin, Delta and AA/US. They can chase all of their existing loyal unappealing passengers to them. They are just a bunch of entitled babies as SMI/J puts it.

The holy grail of air travelers are the non revs that currently fly at Spirit, Frontier, and Allegiant because United is smart and this is who they want to be competing with these days based on their actions. This is at least what the spreadsheet monkeys are telling them I bet since spreadsheets also told them about cashews.

channa

How so?

If anything, UA needs WiFi now more than ever. Since UA has more competition than CO, there are differentiators in place. If someone flying out of ORD or LAX has head to head competition with AA, and AA has near-guaranteed WiFi, while UA is a crapshoot, the WiFi can push the business one way or another.

No WiFi worked for the Houston base -- no competition, flights generally shorter (3-4 hours max, domestic), and IAH-based folks are going to fly with the Texas-based airline no matter what, because it's run by good people.

J.Edward

Strongly disagree about Gogo.

This last year my IAH → West Coast (SFO, LAX, PDX, and SEA) travel has been primarily on DL through SLC.

When I first resolved myself to enduring a connection out of IAH I had simply written off a half-day as lost time, which was about double the time I would attribute to a comparable non-stops but I found myself actually being productive on DL thanks to Gogo (the majority of my work is based online, so access to the internet is critical for me being able to accomplish the majority of my tasks.)

Of course UA is looking to close the wifi gap, and of course not everyone needs inflight wifi to be productive, but for me, and what I need to do, I have come to the point where I would rather take a flight with wifi, even if I have to endure a connection, as the internet access allows me to work where else I would just sit there and stare out the window and watch time go by.

But more importantly, the fact that I can accomplish ~80% of my tasks in air if connected to the internet means that flight time, even if prolonged due to a connection, is suddenly productive and thus the PITA factor of both travel and the connection is greatly ameliorated.

Said another way, I can be more productive with on-time wifi-equipped flights (Gogo is quick enough to support our online workflow platform) and this is a big deal to me professionally and I assume others as well who are in a similar situation placing UA in a material disadvantage when compared to their industry peers.

NiceLanding

I didn't quite realize how useful wifi could be, even on 1-2 hour flights, until I began to experience it for myself. Even with pitifully slow current GoGo speeds, I frequently find myself in near-realtime conversations via text messaging or email that allow me to deal with immediate issues and keep others productive. It's a lot cheaper than inflight calls, too, without any of their obvious problems. At this point, I try hard to avoid daytime flights with no wifi.

DaviddesJ

Are you still talking about the 737-900ER's? What is your problem with the interiors? They seem fine to me. I understand how some people are frustrated at UA's wifi deployment (if they need it to keep in touch with colleagues or customers during the day), but the slow wifi rollout isn't an "interior decision", right?

Most of my work is online, but I still have plenty of things on my to-do list that aren't online, like reading or writing. I can understand that you can't do your most urgent tasks without connectivity, but it's hard to imagine how you could have nothing worth doing at all. And if you get those things out of the way during flights then you have more time for other tasks at other times.

halls120

Can't speak for others, but I find sCO aircraft to be dark and gloomy compared to sUA planes - dark paneling and dark blue upholstery make their interiors more gloomy than a sUA aircraft. Last week I flew a sUA A320on IAD-SFO, and then jumped on a fairly new sCO 738, and the contrast was remarkable. I was in F on both flights, so the seats were equally comfortable, but the sUA interior just seemed brighter.