-Brian was asked about the cancellation of the Houston Intercontinental (IAH)-Auckland 787 launch ro

I flew last week to Chicago to experience the tail end of Star MegaDo 4. Hundreds of frequent flyer enthusiasts from forums like Flyertalk and Milepoint get together and fly around the world together and meet with various airline and hotel executives. Star of course refers to Star Alliance. A DO (pronounced like the word do or due) is simply a get-together pennsylvania bus tour company while a MegaDo is a really big get together. Space to attend these events is always quite limited pennsylvania bus tour company and there is a cost from $1,000 up to $5,000 depending on how much of the event you want to attend (domestic or international+domestic) and what class you ll be sitting pennsylvania bus tour company in on the plane. Participants were treated to flying a brand new United 787 Dreamliner among many other goodies.
I was invited to attend the United portion of the DO in Chicago for free so that s what I ll talk about. United billed it as their inaugural DO, so this will likely become an annual event. I ll also cover the hotel I stayed in, the local DDF (DansDeals Forum) DO , and a small part of the local kosher scene that I experienced.
This is not my typical vacation trip report, rather it is a long and technical trip report about United Airlines. If you slog through it I d love to hear your feedback in a comment and whether I should cover other such events pennsylvania bus tour company in the future.
Participants were able to choose between a tour on Thursday of airport operations, in-flight catering, and a Headquarters tour. I went for the headquarters tour. I m not sure I made the right decision as some of the pictures from the airport experience looked really pennsylvania bus tour company awesome, pennsylvania bus tour company but I did learn a great amount of fascinating info from the HQ tour.
United is based in the 110 story Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) in downtown Chicago and occupies some 25% of the building. After going through airport security we were split into groups of 5 to tour the 28th floor, which is the nerve center for United Airlines. This purpose-built room wraps around the building and people can reach out to other departments without going through a single door. From here the employees control every aspect of the airline and make sure that United s half a million daily passengers are going to arrive where they are trying to get to on time.
It s interesting to note that from here Continental lives on. Continental and United still run on completely different systems. While employees that assign pennsylvania bus tour company crews for subsidiary Continental aircraft use Cosmos, employees that assign crews for subsidiary United aircraft use a system called pennsylvania bus tour company Unimatic. In fact earlier on Thursday United was nearly ready to cancel the entire headquarters tour as Unimatic suffered a complete failure that grounded all United aircraft and sent the 28th floor into emergency mode. United has not decided as of yet which system will survive but I jokingly asked one of the Continental controllers whether she had sabotaged the Unimatic system pennsylvania bus tour company that morning
It is amazing to see firsthand the hundreds and hundreds of employees it takes to keep the airline running smoothly. The information available at their fingertips is incredible. There are people looking at every delay and how it will affect the connection pennsylvania bus tour company times of everyone on the plane and whether they ll need to call ahead to other aircraft to request a 10 minute delay to wait for connecting passengers. I can go on and on about this part of the tour but don t want to bore you too badly. See the pictures below for more.
After this we got to simulate a mock-emergency in their emergency response room where we played the role of various responders. This room is activated in cases like Superstorm Sandy and the Nor easter that followed it as well as earlier in the day with the Unimatic failure. While every responder in the room read off or summarized the script in front of our seats there was a DDF (DansDeals Forum) member who answered the question so thoroughly and casually that some other people in the group asked which position on the floor he just came from before sneaking pennsylvania bus tour company into the group and the United employes even told him to leave his resume with them
The next stop was learning about bio-fuels and how fuel make from Algae will revolutionize air travel and stop the increase of CO2 levels caused by air travel. This was interesting for a few minutes but at an hour long it just dragged on and wasn t the reason that I went to a United event.
Brian Znotins, VP of United s network strategy and a former Continental employee, spoke next about route planning and it was downright fascinating. He joked that while Delta may pick new routes by using a dart and map strategy the way United does it is by forecasting the profit or loss and market share they would make on a new route given the aircraft they have, the loyalty and preference of a customer base to fly United and earn United miles, the schedule preferences, the percentage of passengers that are on business, visiting friends of relatives (VFRs in industry speak), or just on a leisure trip. While there is a lot of publicly available data on this there is still a lot of guesswork that goes into route planning but he noted that they have one big advantage over the hotel industry. If a route doesn t work out they can always just pull it!
All of the new planes that United received with the integration pennsylvania bus tour company are helping to make all kinds of new routes possible as any given route can be profitable or unprofitable with a different plane configuration.
Brian is very passionate and knowledgeable about airline routes. He said that whenever someone talks about a trip they took he ll ask about the routing they took. Another member in the room said that s what we all do as well!
-I asked about the internationally configured 777-200 pennsylvania bus tour company that just started flying between Houston and Honolulu and that United.com currently shows as flying through the end of scheduling and was told that it will not last long.
If you want to fly to Hawaii in Global First class on lie-flat beds you probably only have a matter of weeks to try that. At just 70,000 USAirways miles (less than 60,000 Starpoints) to fly that class on United it s an incredible bargain.
-Brian said that the reason Delta and American pennsylvania bus tour company announced copycats of Economy Plus across their fleets last year some 12 years after United first launched it was due to the Continental guys coming over and validating that Economy Plus made business sense and that all subsidiary pennsylvania bus tour company Continental aircraft would be converted pennsylvania bus tour company to have Economy Plus.
-The Newark-Tel Aviv route is an anomaly. While most international routes pennsylvania bus tour company survive or die by their premium class passengers the TLV route is extremely successful in coach but less so in Business, where it is full of upgraders. While the route was once Continental s most profitable the introduction of Delta service to Tel Aviv eroded the profits on the route. When Continental ordered 787s many years ago it was widely though that they would operated a 3rd daily Tel Aviv flight but now that route has been pushed down the list as there are bigger fish to fry. While it seems unlikely for the 787-800 to do a Tel Aviv run it s possible we ll see Tel Aviv flights with the coming of the 787-900 in 2014.
-While on most flights 1 business seat is more profitable than having 3 more economy pennsylvania bus tour company seats Tel Aviv seems to be an exception and if they had a plane heavier in coach seats it could make more sense for Tel Aviv.
- On DDF we ve had some lively discussions about a 3rd United TLV flight from Chicago or S. Francisco. There s actually a lot of internal debate on that very topic as the revenue guys think there s going to be a lot of business class travel between S. Francisco and Tel Aviv while the network planning guys think Chicago pennsylvania bus tour company would make more logical sense as more traffic from across the country can feed into it. Of course a 3rd daily flight out of Newark can also make sense as that grabs traffic from NYC as well as the entire country.
-3 class Global First makes sense in very limited markets and there won t be any future plane deliveries with Global First given the current market. pennsylvania bus tour company If anything United pennsylvania bus tour company may look into a new product that in between Economy Plus (which currently features only extra legroom) and Business class.
-Brian spoke about Delta s strategy to save money on leases pennsylvania bus tour company by flying some 35 year old planes. From United s standpoint they are going after having the youngest fleet possible to save on operational problems, fuel economy, and for customer satisfaction and safety. The day after this seminar Delta s strategy was laid out in the Wall Street Journal, pennsylvania bus tour company so that was interesting to see.
-United is investing heavily in the 787 as they continue to predict more demand for long-haul nonstop international flights to smaller markets. They re excited to test this strategy out for Denver-Tokyo that s going to be a 787 route next year.
-Brian pennsylvania bus tour company was asked about the cancellation of the Houston Intercontinental (IAH)-Auckland 787 launch route. If the route was forecast to be profitable than why yank it? United cancelled this route in response to the city of Houston granting Southwest the right to fly internationally out of Houston Hobby (HOU) airport. pennsylvania bus tour company United said they welcomed Southwest to compete out of IAH but that flying internationally out of HOU would be harmful to Houston. He insists that this was not a matter of retaliation but rather simple math. There would only be a few people a day flying from Houston to Auckland so the vast majority of the flight would be connecting from other cities. IAH has thrived as a hub airport pennsylvania bus tour company and was in a virtuous cycle as more flights fed into other flights and the airport kept growing. United believes pennsylvania bus tour company this is because there is only 1 international airport in Houston. Once Houston is split into 2 international airports that will spin IAH into a vicious cycle of fewer routes that will cause other route losses and hub shrinkage pennsylvania bus tour company as lots of flights will lose a few passengers from international destinations. In a business with tiny