milepig

This confirms that my decision to not renew the club was the right way to go. Those agents were gold, and got me out of all sorts of travel snafus. Otherwise, the clubs have become pretty worthless.

Unimatrix One

I don't fly to the US much, but even I've been helped by UC agents. On my last trip before the pandemic, I had a misconnect at ORD on my way to Tokyo. The agent at the B18 club took great care of me.

tcp1

This is absolutely ridiculous if it's happening across the system. Reinforces my belief that companies are now using "The Pandemic" to simply justify more and more service cuts.

I was last at the clubs two weeks ago. Both IAD and DEN were fully staffed. Removal of this benefit would make me drop my club membership in a microsecond. What's the point, other than an overpriced bar, packaged snacks, and an area as crowded as the gate..

UC agents have been immensely helpful in the past 5 years, to the point where a few incidents justified the whole years' fee alone.

This absolutely and completely sounds like a Kirbyesque kind of change, though. Eerily so. To the point where I read the title of this thread and said to myself "You've got to be $*(@(@ing me, Kirby." This may be the kick that puts me into free agent land after 27 years loyal to United.

halls120

LOL….thanks for starting my day off with some humor.

No way a virtual agent is the same as a live agent, but leave it to Kirby to find another way to shaft his customers

ezefllying

I disagree. About a year ago, I was at the DCA Sky Club when my flight to LAX, via ATL, got sufficiently delayed to render a misconnect. I had been upgraded. Though I consider myself pretty resourceful, I hadn't found any good alternatives, and F was full-up everywhere else. The agent ultimately offered two options: F IAD-SEA-LAX, which would require me to drive to Dulles (not awful; not great) or DCA-JFK-SEA-LAX, with JFK-SEA on a 764 in Delta One. I took the latter. That was a highly not-by-the-book routing, especially since she rebooked me in J, but I appreciated it. And she was extremely pleasant.

But I will say that, as a committed United flyer, the no-nonsense, just-make-it-happen approach of many UA agents is refreshing. A lot of infrequent travelers I know complaint about United for the same reason I like it: Many of the agents aren't warm and cuddly, but strictly business. Thing is, strictly business often gets stuff done. As the descendant of New Yorkers, that's good with me. So when a United agent sees my misconnection, sees that I've already been rebooked on an okay-but-not-great flight, and asks, "So, which flight do you really want?" -- and then rebooks me onto it, even though it's not necessarily the most "logical" flight -- I appreciate it. Were they giggly and complimentary the whole time? Not at all. But I got my boarding pass, upgrade restored, in 120 seconds.

flugvergnugen

As a data point, the area where the customer service agents sit at the IAH B club was empty yesterday. I noticed it but attributed it to it being the B club, and not one of the larger ones...

PTahCha

+1 - when they work magic, they worth their weight in gold. As an example, at LGA RCC (this was pre-merger), I had a delay that would cause me to misconnect. Before I approach the service rep, they paged me to the desk, handed me a revised non-stop booking on AA, and printed a paper ticket "just in case the ticket did not transfer through".

milepig

The LGA crew was among the best! Walking around the space to find someone with a new BP already printed was a common experience.

Ditto MSP - I used to fly through there almost every Saturday evening. The agent in the club (always the same one) would see me come in the door and hand me my already printed upgrade BP.

worldwidedreamer

I'm not sure about all the negativity in this thread. An early post has the QR code for the priority chat website. It links to the URL https://united.fiveout.app/welcome.

Now anyone with the link can access a lounge-quality representative from anywhere in the world. From my perspective I'll use this far more than an actual human agent at a lounge.

SS255

The UC agent would have solved my problem in the time it would take me to type my destination, name and birthdate on my tiny iPhone keyboard.

zoned_post_meridiem

Maybe. But it's unproven. What happens when ORD shuts down for an hour or two, and a few thousand people flood the app?

There's a subset of travelers who don't have access to GS-levels of service, but travel through places like ORD -- where a nearby lightning strike can wreak havoc in minutes -- frequently enough to make fast access to competitive agents for a few hundred $/year well worth it. I'm suspicious that a widely accessible app/remote agent can offer the same type of service. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

worldwidedreamer

Don't get me wrong, I agree 100% that UA should have agents in clubs. Just saying that this strategy can help anyone with the URL.

gokeeper

Real lounge-quality representative usually reply to your question in a few seconds instead of minutes.

HNLbasedFlyer

Interesting at least to me - one moment they are lounge dragons in a fairly derogatory way - now they will surely be missed with all sorts of outrage. Maybe someone at UA was reading some threads and said - well - if they don’t want dragons we will eliminate them (kidding)

WineCountryUA

To be fair, the negative comments with lounge agents tended to be those handling entry, not those assisting on travel issues -- two very different roles and at least at the hubs at separate stations.