LASUA1K

What about ORD-ATL? ORD-DTW? ORD is bigger than DTW but its still mostly all regional. ORD and ATL, yes ORD isn't the same size as ATL but it's close. How could UA justify flying mostly rj's when DL was flying 757's, MD90's and 717's. Now 739's are on the route.

davidviolin

The looks and sighs and open frustration when people realize its a tiny plane that cant even handle the carry on's and they have to gate check everything, and wait 15 mins after deplaning to retrieve in crowded jet bridge, yes, people hate that. I am not sure why anyone is even arguing this.


I see what you are saying, but there are on some routes for instance that I do not even bother going to kaya or momondo, I know what airline I want, and for example with DL I use their two week low fare guide, and thats it.

LarkSFO

What is a 'two week low fare guide'?

Tchiowa

If they had the demand for seats to justify a bigger plane I'm sure they'd use it. They're not going to put a 787 on that route just to make people feel better while they fly with 20% of their seats sold.

kapkap46

Ridiculous comment. Captain is in the Left Seat during Take off and Landings and any weather. He is the one that is responsible whether First Officer has hands on yoke or not.

How would you like to have some 1000 hour pilot with your life or Captain Sullenberger who landed in the Hudson.

There is no substitute for experience and that is what you get in Full Size jets.

You don't get it with Mini Jets. Simple as that!

Always Flyin

Captains on regional jets have thousands of hours of experience. First officers have to have at least 1,500. They are not inexperienced aviators.

Profitable today. But its profits have trailed its competition. Significantly. And what about tomorrow?

Does anyone seriously think UA's current business plan is savvy and a good long-term strategy?

dulcamara

This is one of the most bizarre threads I've ever seen. "World class" and "US carrier" have been orthogonal since the glory days of Pam Am.

Smisek Air? World class? Perhaps if the world is Pluto.

davidviolin

Go to delta.com and select "flexible days" when you search. Gives you a decent guide to what days are lower priced.


Right, chicken and the egg... They can either provide better planes and better service and people will notice and fly UA more. Or they can provide bad service and horrible planes and people will notice and fly them less. And then when they can't find smaller planes, they cut frequency.

Casing point: UA used to fly RJ ONLY between ATL-NYC I would say about 6 times daily. Now they switched to mainline A319's, with at least one 738 per day, and the planes are mostly full, just like when they used RJ's. People notice.

EWR764

Connectivity is a function of the number of destinations served, capacity and number of departures. Delta has a massive number of flights, seats and destinations served from ATL, an operation which is orders of magnitude larger than UAL @ DEN.

BearX220

I doubt investors in Dollar General ever set foot in the stores, either.

Patently false assertions there.

The argument that UA schedules RJs on some trunk routes because that's what the traffic will bear overlooks the probability that the RJs are repelling traffic. It can be a self-accelerating failure spiral: bad planes --> fewer customers --> less demand --> more bad planes --> even fewer customers.

LaserSailor

Captain Sullenbergers command inputs were over-ridden by the Airbus software to conform to the descent.

The success of the 'Miracle on the Hudson' was a result of pilot, co-pilot, crew, passengers, ATC, and first responders in the NY Metro area - not just pilot training.

Debates about safety of mainline vs RJ are usually infantile.

LarkSFO

How on earth would that be valuable to me? (on DL.com, UA, AA, or an airfare search site)

When I travel for a meeting, the meeting is fixed and I need to get there.

When I travel personally, I may look at the 'low fares +/- 3 days' option, but in most cases we have a fixed date of departure and return.

Perhaps one day far in the future when we are retired, we will have the luxury of looking at two week windows to find less expensive flights!

spin88

As I showed above, the year before Jeff introduced his "savvy" plan, United made MORE money (by $100M) than did Delta. In the first three years of his plan (which was supposed to result in an extra $1.2B in profits/year) UA made either 1/8 (if you included the massive integration related expenses) or 1/2 (if you don't) of what Delta did...

Why? Well a large part of it is that United used to have large numbers of people who just flew UA, even though they had options on most/all routes. They were happy enough with the service and they got valuable benefits from concentration their flying on UA. They had a flight, they just went to UA.com. I used to do this, lots of people I know used to do this, lots of people I know still do this, just not on UA.com, they now go to VX.com, or DL.com or AA.com.

When Jeff and his Houston crew took over, United changed the value proposition. They focused on upsell revenue (following the advise of the hunter keays of the world), and did so to the dramatic detriment of those who flew they day in and day out, and then they cut the OT reliability, reduced IRROPs recovery, and cut the quality of the hard and soft product.

We see the results on this board day in and day out. People who used to mostly/exclusively fly UA (and would have paid more to concentrate their flying on UA) now (a) don't fly UA at all, book away from UA, or (b) only fly UA when its clearly the best option and then when its cheaper. I think you are an example of (b) - as you have admitted you take VX when it has a flight that works - and I bet that before Jeff took over you would just have taken United. What you do mirrors what everyone I know in SF who still flies United does, they shop around.

And when - as UA has become - your product is a commodity, with no positive benefits and some serious disseminates associated with it, you have to discount more to try to fill your planes. The result is predictable, and a number of us predicted it - PRASM and yield have stagnated, and the loss of passenger revenue that results has just swamped any extra upsell revenue that UA has pried out of people's hands when added to the savings from the cuts to product and service quality.

davidviolin

I did not say it was valuable to you. I said thats what I do. We are different people with different needs.

minnyfly

That is probably a piece of it, but this thread offers more of a reason why UA will never rank high. You have an OP that erroneously believes the pilot is at fault for having to burn off fuel. It may not have been caused by the small plane or ground crew at all. You have multiple others complain that UA doesn't offer proper competition against DL on the same route. But they are failing to recognize and understand the markets and connective flows that show that UA is a strong competitor on a relative basis, and it's DL that doesn't compete well. You have further more complain about how UA has more RJs, failing to understand that their balanced, smaller hub structure will always demand that if UA is to match supply and demand and remain profitable. They don't realize the alternative could be no nonstop flight at all, or that you would have to go out of your way to connect in ATL, DFW, or CLT because that's all the carrier has.

Customer satisfaction scores are inherently biased. They treat every customer as if they have the same expectations. That's simply not true. People are different, and you will have different expectations based on culture, knowledge, brand experience, etc. In the airline industry, it's much easier to satisfy your customer when they didn't expect much in the first place.

The airline industry essentially is a commodity. UA would be foolish not to operate its business as such. They would be out of business is no time. You simply cannot afford to spend large money greatly differentiating your product when the vast, vast majority of what the customer is paying for is the same across the board--safe transportation from point A to point B. The best separater is price.

BTW, you're smiling when your predictions have been wrong lately?

The demand was likely already there, and/or UA is experiencing lower yields. RJs are simply not driving away an significant amount of traffic from, say, RJ demand to mainline demand.