FlyerTalk
The decision by United Airlines’ management to use Continental’s Shares reservations system for the merged carrier has been causing serious problems since its implementation last weekend. So the news that the airline is working on a new version of its IT platform, integrating some of the features of the pre-merger United’s Apollo system, is very welcome, indeed.
It was hardly surprising that CEO Jeff Smisek and his team chose to keep Shares, given that most policies and practices of the combined carrier have followed the way Continental did business under Smisek. But in this case, the decision made good financial sense — Continental has owned Shares for years, while United paid Travelport, the company that owns Apollo.
As I completed the last research trip for my upcoming book on the U.S. Foreign Service on Sunday, I was worried much less than many passengers and United employees, who had warned me not to fly during the first days of the integrated system. The merger was first announced in May 2010, so the company surely had plenty of time to prepare — and if not, it would have delayed integration, I thought.
I was wrong. On the first day of the new era, March 3, I monitored the situation from Frankfurt, where I overnighted on my way back from Iraq. Delays were widespread, which the United employees I talked to the next day attributed largely to their inability to board passengers automatically by scanning boarding passes — each person had to be boarded manually.
The other reason for the problems was how unprepared pre-merger United agents were to use Shares. They had been trained, but obviously not quite enough — actually, it may be more a matter of experience than training.
The real issue is Shares’ complexity, clumsiness, use-unfriendliness and lack of intuitiveness compared to Apollo. That was my first impression when I initially looked at it at three different airports, and it was confirmed by several longtime United employees, some of whom showed me long multiple-page instructions for basic functions, which resembled complex formulas.
Some agents are still having trouble printing boarding passes for flights for which I’d checked in online — one said, “It would have taken me five seconds in Apollo.” Others find it challenging to decipher seat maps.
I didn’t want to make a final judgment on Shares without consulting Continental employees, who have been using the system for years, and I had a chance to do that yesterday. Those agents had been sent to pre-merger United stations to help their inexperienced new colleagues — but from what I could see, there was much more demand than supply.
Those Continental agents, who also had some knowledge of Apollo, agreed with my first impressions of Shares. They also told me that Continental hadn’t invested much in modernizing Shares, but that was about to change. In a few months, they said, there will be a new version combining current features with some of the best Apollo functions.
One can only hope. The question is, why couldn’t integration wait until then? Those poor pre-merger United agents have to learn one system now, and another — apparently less complicated — in a few months?
I asked a corporate contact at United about the new plans and received the following response: “I think you’ve been hearing about a new GUI [graphical user interface] that will be added to Shares later this year. It will make it more user-friendly for our agents. We didn’t want to postpone the customer benefits that were gained by going to one passenger service system — one frequent-flier program, one website, any agent able to help any customer, etc. — by waiting until the GUI was in place.”
A task of this magnitude will always be accompanied by problems, especially at the world’s largest airline. At least for me, however, those problems have been much worse than I expected. Perhaps this is due in part to the higher numbers of pre-merger United employees compared to Continental’s — after all, United was the bigger airline.
Shares is incapable of performing some vital functions that Apollo offered. For example, upgrades using miles or certificates can no longer be waitlisted less than 24 hours before departure. So if your international flight, which you have upgraded with miles, is canceled and you are rebooked on another flight, you won’t be put on an upgrade waitlist on the day of travel. If, however, there is an available upgrade seat, you should be able to get it.
Another problem that is affecting thousands of passengers has to do with upgrades waitlisted in Apollo before the conversion. All segments waitlisted in NF booking class, which United used for upgrades to First Class, converted into ON in Shares. ON inventory exists only on three-cabin aircraft. On two-cabin planes however, the correct code is R. So if you are waitlisted in ON on a two-cabin domestic flight, you will never clear, because there will never be availability in that booking class.
United has a representative on FlyerTalk who monitors various comments, and she has indicated the carrier is aware of the incorrect conversion issue but hasn’t yet found a solution.
One of my favorite features of the old Continental website, which United’s didn’t have, was the information about where your aircraft is coming from. I was very happy it was preserved on the new site, but my happiness has been seriously tempered this week. The tool is offering plenty of erroneous data.
Just one example: Today’s flight 984 from San Francisco to Portland, OR, is operated on a Boeing 757. According to the website, the plane is coming from Monterey, CA. The problem is that the aircraft flying back from Monterey is an Embraer regional jet.
Here is the silver lining in all this: Whatever the problems at the new United, they pale in comparison to the systemic breakdowns that occurred during the US Airways-America West merger in the middle of the last decade.
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Continue reading about Did United choose the best rez system?
The owners of FareCompare.com have apparently decided to destroy what used to be one of the most useful websites for consumer travel. Its best features were removed last weekend, and many of the remaining ones are not working properly. Talk about fixing something that wasn’t broken.
For a couple of years, FareCompare has been talking about catering more to the airline industry than consumers, proposing a system to track mistake fares and alert carriers, so they can correct them. The company has also stepped up advertising — both on the site and in e-mail messages.
Could it be that it feels pressure to make it more difficult for consumers to find better deals and spend less money on air travel?
In both my book and my classes, I stress the importance of monitoring fares and learning when a low fare is published — regardless of travel dates and seat availability — so you can take advantage of it before it disappears. As I say, I want to know what’s possible, and then I’ll do whatever I can to get the best price. That was one of FareCompare’s main strengths.
You could program your account — in the “My Trips” section — to keep track of various city-pairs, specify an airline, if you like, and request e-mail alerts every time a new fare on a certain route was filed. When you logged in, all your saved routes appeared on the same page, showing the current lowest fares, along with their place on an airline’s tariff, and the last several lowest filings on that route for comparison. You could also rearrange the city-pairs by price or other criteria.
The “My Trips” section is still there, but most of its previous functions no longer exist. You can’t rearrange the routes, you can’t specify an airline, you don’t see any data from the tariff, such as fare basis codes and valid dates, and you don’t get historical data for comparison. In fact, as I write this, all my 65 saved routes say that a “price is not currently available.”
There have been problems with e-mail alerts for years, but now they seem to have multiplied — the problems, not the alerts.
Finally, FareCompare was great at giving us idea for trips. For example, if you wanted to get away for a long weekend, you could see a list of destinations either by total price or price per mile. However, the page that used to show how far you could fly for the least amount of money — also known as the FlyerTalk page and incredibly useful to leisure travelers — has been removed. There is a message that a new version is “coming soon,” but no one knows why the old version was taken down before the replacement was ready.
There are already frustrated travelers who have posted in two threads on FlyerTalk. Some of them note the conspicuous silence of FareCompare, which actually started one of the threads in 2008.
To be fair, the site does have a map showing fares from any given city to any destination in the world, but I have four problems with it: First, it’s very difficult to use graphically, because many fares appear on top of each other due to the cities’ proximity. Second, you have to specify a month in which you want to travel, which leaves out many fares. Third, the tool that specifies an airline isn’t working. Fourth and most important, some fares are simply wrong.
FareCompare is a free site, and I’m sure some people think we have no right to criticize it or have demands. But I think there is rarely a truly “free” site anymore. We pay for using it one way or another — if not with a subscription fee, perhaps by enduring various ads. And who knows where our e-mail addresses end up?
If FareCompare doesn’t restore its most useful tools, it would be handing AirfareWatchdog.com a great opportunity to fill a much-needed void.
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Flying Blue, the frequent-flier program of Air France/KLM, has banned customer service agents from revealing the codes the airlines use when booking awards or upgrades. If you ask them, they will tell you it’s none of your business. Is this misplaced paranoia or do carriers have the right to keep that information secret?
For smart and sophisticated travelers, the importance of having access to raw airline data cannot be overstated. Benefiting from that access has changed my travel life — it has ensured that I always pay the lowest possible fares and fly in comfort and luxury at the same time. Booking codes, of course, use letters of the alphabet.
Earlier this month, I needed to verify the codes Air France and KLM use for awards and upgrades for my upcoming book, because Flying Blue is making some changes beginning June 1. So I called the Flying Blue North American call center outside Toronto. An agent called Henry Esteban refused to share the information, saying he and his colleagues had specifically been forbidden by management to do so.
I’d never heard such a response to the same question I’d asked so many times before at other airlines, so I requested to speak with a supervisor. Esteban resisted repeatedly, which also surprised me given my Platinum elite status, but eventually he put me through.
The supervisor, Roberto Quote, was just as vehement in his refusal to discuss booking codes. He insisted that was private company information and customers had no right to know it. If you wonder why I didn’t turn to Air France reservations agents, that was actually my first call — but they said they knew nothing about awards and upgrades and referred me to Flying Blue.
In 2009, I wrote about the challenges to airlines presented by the transparency of their data on the Internet. I also wrote specifically about the public availability of award data, which some carriers wanted to control. However, simply identifying the codes used for awards and upgrades has never been an issue — until now.
Although no carrier is legally required to disclose those codes publicly, I have a hard time understanding Flying Blue’s thinking. Does its management really believe that kind of information can be kept secret in 2011, with all the blogs out there and websites like FlyerTalk.com and Milepoint.com?
It may be time for the program to focus on more meaningful and useful subjects in the training of its customer service agents.
Continue reading about Should airline booking codes be secret?
Just as many loyal United Airlines customers hoped that its expected merger with Continental Airlines would put an end to United’s massive blocking of “award” seats made available for mileage redemption by its partners in the global Star Alliance, the carrier made a government filing that raised new questions about its filtering policy.
With all the complex issues United and Continental have to resolve before completing their merger, which would create the world’s largest airline, the “award” blocking is hardly a top agenda item. In fact, I’d be surprised if it has come up at all in their negotiations so far.
However, it’s an important matter for many elite members of United’s Mileage Plus program, as shown by the overwhelming response to my original column exposing the previously secret practice in September 2008. A thread on FlyerTalk.com, the largest online travel community, that was started at the time has had more than 100,000 views and over 2,000 responses to date…
Continue reading about United’s award blocking an issue in Continental merger
Fierce competition in the hospitality business is nothing new, but last week one of the world’s largest hotel companies took the game to a new level with a bold move aimed at enticing customers of a major competitor.
The InterContinental Hotels Group took advantage of many frequent travelers’ anger with Hilton Worldwide for devaluing its loyalty program, HHonors, last month and offered them bonus points if they also have an account with InterContinental’s scheme, Priority Club.
As I reported in November, Hilton decided to increase the number of points required for “award” stays at many of its hotels. It added a new Category 7 to its chart, and for a night at most of its high-end properties it now charges 50,000 points instead of the previous 40,000. Redemption levels at many other hotels jumped by 5,000 points…
Continue reading about Hilton, InterContinental cross swords
