United Airlines commentary

This may not be of interest to many of you, and I am a big proponent of Amtrak. I am certainly dismayed by the cutbacks in service quality, breakdowns, and mishaps of Amtrak. But, I am also a loyal customer of United, which has often been the object of much criticism. I have had some complaints with them, notably more than once changing my flight itineraries without properly notifying me. I only found out by periodically checking on my upcoming reservations. Now, they have arranged to text me.

Anyway, this past week I made an eight day round trip from Phoenix to Virginia and New York City, utilizing the airports of Phoenix, Chicago O'hare, Norfolk, and Newark., comprising four flights. The purpose was to attend a convention of the National Association for Interpretation in Virginia Beach, where I stayed five nights, and three nights in New York CIty for personal business , where I spent three. All four flights arrived at their destinations up to 40 minutes early. I do not give United five stars on their quality of service, but I would give them four. It is not luxurious, pampered service, but I found just about everything on this trip to be on the money and well organized. I am able to make use of the United Club lounges, which are quite pleasant and offer some pretty good snack food, and these days travel Economy Plus, which was quite roomy, at least legroom wise, never mind the width of the seat. Would I want to sit in that seat for the length of a cross country Amtrak trip? Of course not, but for up to several hours I was reasonably comfortable. I only had ginger ale or juice, not having any of their food offerings. However, in the past, I have found the food decent, which is a separate charge, and is better than the old days of complimentary but usually mediocre to poor hot meals.

As you can tell, I was fairly pleased with United this time. Next week I am going to Hawaii on them, not for the first time, and will see how that goes. Some comparisons are valid between air and train travel, but the train is a vastly different experience. But there needs to be more uniformity of good service and RELIABILTY on Amtrak.

One of the things that I, like most about United is their web App. It is amazing how accurate in real time the information provided on it it. For example, last weekend everyone was stuck in Newark for a while because of FAA equipment failure in the New York Tracon. Naturally when that happens departures get pushed back due to ground stop and some gate changes happen to accommodate flights coming in out of sequence and aircraft allocations for outgoing flights changing. Me being an air-fan too, while I waited for my flight, I was checking various other flight status and my own. Amazingly changes in projected departure time appeared in the App either simultaneously or a little before it appeared on the departure board throughout the airport. For flights that had gate changes, those too appeared in the App at the same time as on the departure boards. The notifications of the changes came to me on SMS almost at the same time too. And finally the flight left ten minutes before the projected departure time. I was very impressed.

So after that experience I dug into it a bit more on FlyerTalk, and I found that United's customer facing IT gets generally high marks from travelers, surprisingly even compared to even airlines like Singapore and Emirates, which otherwise get higher marks by far than United.

The I got thinking what an equivalent capable customer facing IT could potentially be like for Amtrak, and got a bit depressed with the current state of affairs.

Frankly you have to go through an IROPS situation to see how well the customer facing IT is, and I have generally found United's to be quite capable at handling those and Amtrak's not so much.