News and notes from around the interweb:
- Julie Johnsson summarizes just how bad United’s computer systems have been. Poor performance, combined with extreme arrogance, help explain why the airline has been losing a couple hundred thousand customers a month. (HT: @mattyglesias)
- PointsHound now offers Bitcoin as an alternative to earning miles for your your hotel bookings.
- 10% off Virgin America flights if you book today for travel through February 13.
- John F. Kennedy phone call discussing retribution against Pan Am for its order of Concorde aircraft. He talks about the Boeing SST program (“our program”) — meanwhile the history of the Concorde program and the Tupolev TU-144 shows how bad an investment that would have been to push forward with. (HT: @HackMyTrip)
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Unrelated to United’s pilot scheduling issues, they were unable to see the same award space in their telephone booking system as they could see online (and I could see through Aeroplan) this week.
I agree with the “United arrogance” comment – it’s a terrible confluence of incompetence and arrogance that customers universally hate. However, do you have a source for the “losing 100k customers a month”? I really find that one hard to believe – mostly because I have no idea how you’d quantify it. Is their load factor down and overall capacity the same? So they aren’t selling tickets? Or is there some survey where people state “I will never fly United again in my life” and then it’s extrapolated? Basically everything I’ve read says that leisure travelers (75% of domestic) pick on price (part of why UAL can be arrogant to some class of passengers). And as a business traveler, I’ve got to pick based on schedule and price – and since I don’t fly out of LAX anymore I can’t just say “never United again.” Who are these > 100k people a month?
Anyway I’d love if the “losing customers” but was true – maybe they’d stop the dickish behavior. I just don’t believe it – people will fly them despite the insult.