niele

Just read your message mikensf74 and yes I'm a runnin'...... many, many thanks for the info

Spence1097

This is most certainly true, I'm not comfortable giving away my company name here but I can tell you it's a very big company and everyone hear would know the name. Travel budget across all departments including sales slashed tremendously the last two quarters. Again from what I have heard talking with clients etc, their budgets are also getting cut. Perhaps others here can share what's going on at your company, but if this is any indication, UA and the travel industry in general are going to be hurting.

niele

Just got off the phone and to get a refund of the difference it would of cost me $150.00 per ticket for the "service charge", so I'd get 76 cents back per ticket, wow! So I opted for the voucher which will give me the refund back in "united dollars" ... better than nothing I'll just have to plan another trip. Again, many thanks mikensf74 ^

Javan69

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Given that my ORD-MUC flight on 11/7 is C0 (so much for my SWU u/g, but at least SFO-ORD is F), I'd say, I hope there are some cancellations. (I/B, MUC-IAD-SFO is C9 all the way at this point.)

notquiteaff

Yup. I booked SFO-BOS-SFO last night for about 10 days out and had a hard time finding a flight with decent E+ seats. Pretty much everything left were individual middle seats in E- and E+ (I did see a lot of F9, though).

I am pretty sure the economy is putting a damper on a lot of leisure and business travel (though in my case the above flight will be my own business travel this year), but I am not sure we can draw any conclusions from individual flights, one way or another.

runningshoes

UAUA tripled in the last 2 weeks or so, seems the financial community thinks the situation is not that bad in spite of the huge Q3 loss and the slowdown. Oil prices should help with holiday travel and overall loads for UA seem reasonable, although personally I would expect less people on planes for the next few months.

UX routes in/out of ORF are always loaded (close to 100%) but the military plays a large role here and AA recently dropped their ORF-ORD route so UX is the only ORD route, (SW has ORF-MDW).

airshane

I've got an upcoming project that might be taking place in Sante Fe. I live in Denver. I decided if the project happens, I'm driving. Not because the flight cost or anything, but I've been on so many airplanes the last few months that a 5 hour road trip, when counting the time it takes to check-in, drop bags, clear security, then wait for the flight; will take just about as long. I would imagine that might be why the short haul flights have less people on them. Not to mention gas at $2.49 now. Since I'll get $0.485/mile, I could actually make some money on that, and it would be helluva lot more convinient.

airshane

Agreed. My company has said no "leasure" travel. So no more training, no more face-to-face meetings. The only reason we have for buying a ticket is if we're going on billable engagements, and even then they are encouraging that if we can do a week from our home office, rather than travel to the client site, then to do it. I'm actually OK with that right now as in the last 3 months I have only been home a total of 10 days, and yes, that does count weekends.

Mike Jacoubowsky

Frankly, I don't see how a couple of reductions that add up to 20% are going to be enough to do the job. United has "done the deed" in a quick & nasty way in the past, as you can read here (basically, just days after 9/11, UA and AA made the decision to eliminate 20,000 employees... each). It's actually curious that they aren't reacting more quickly and decisively to the most-recent threat (worldwide recession). It could be that they don't want to downsize so much that they can't regain their stature when the economy recovers.

I'm still thinking the only airline that comes out of this well will be American. All they have to do is hang on until one, hopefully two legacy carriers go into bankruptcy and try to get debtor financing... which they won't, forcing them to liquidate. Once that happens, AA can finally file themselves and get rid of some of their debt load (basically offloading their pensions to the government, like everybody else has done through bankruptcy), and emerge as the dominant player.

Javan69

Why on Earth would you purchase tix for Feb. in July???

niele

Really want to see the grandkids and once I bought the tickets it was a "done deal" plus I kind of like to have a choice of seats

KarmaPolice

I would echo this... as a consultant that goes into a lot of different companies... i've seen at least half-dozen companies in the last month put complete freezes on spending for projects...

we're not anywhere near the bottom yet... this quarter is going to be even worse than Q3... and the airlines will really start feeling it as all those other consulting companies will stop flying to see customers in similar situations...

Trulyblues

Yep...but try watching a movie, reading a book, drinking alcohol or sleeping while you're driving for five hours. Any and all of those are reasons that I love being on a plane, and when you add "no e-mails and no phone calls" it is priceless.