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United-Continental conversion survives technical glitches
The integration of United and Continental Airlines technology last weekend — the largest single passenger service system conversion in history — either:
A. Had some snags?
B. Had some problems but most were resolved?
C. Had no significant delays?
D. All of the above?
How it went depends on who was reporting it, but the event was certainly not the outright passenger-inconvenient disaster some had predicted.
The conversion process involved moving millions of reservations and re-establishing numerous communication links.
According to reports, technical issues on Saturday were cleared up by Sunday, when United’s on-time performance was better than 77%.
That exceeds the on-time performance recorded on the same Sunday a year earlier, according to worldairlinenews.
By Monday, the airline’s domestic on-time performance was even better at more than 90%.
"With a project of this magnitude, it is natural that we would have a few technical issues, and we expected and prepared for operational challenges," said United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy.
United spent months preparing for the event and trained about 15,000 employees for it, but that still didn’t prevent some technical issues at its check-in kiosks.
"We did have some issues with our kiosks and at times that slowed the check-in process," McCarthy said.
On United's Facebook page, several passengers complained over the weekend about waiting on the phone for nearly two hours for a United customer representative for help with reservation problems.
"Infuriating," a United passenger posted on Facebook. "I finally got someone, but not before spending a total of almost 10 hours on hold with them in total calls over the weekend. The worst!"
Combining the reservation systems of the now merged airlines was the last major change in its merger, which now represents the largest airline in the world.
By David Wilkening
David
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