Sitting at home on a Saturday afternoon waiting for tonight’s Notre Dame upset of Florida State, I decided to ring United’s 1K Desk to ask why they insisted on making me look bad…….
Back on July 1, I posted the fact that United was finally moving to an electronic method to redeem Global Premier Upgrades for use on Lufthansa operated flights. That post was prompted by the assurance from 2 United reps, including a supervisor that the electronic process would start on August 1. Well, that obviously never happened.
So I call back on August 29, asking about the delay and I was assured that it was about to go ‘live’ and that passengers could start to use the new system on September 3, +/- a few days. So I shouted from the mountain tops that the process was finally here.
Well Labor Day came and went and no sign of the new system, even though every Mileage Plus associate has been trained in the new system and are ready to use it.
So today I call and ask if there are any updates and spoke for a while to a wonderful agent who had a great sense of humor. After letting her know that my expectations were set for August 3rd and September 3rd, she said suggested that the new date could be ‘Maybe-never 3rd’. Though I wasn’t happy about the lack of a start date, I couldn’t help to laugh at her punch-line.
So as it stands, there is NO FIRM DATE for the launch of the electronic process. The lesson learned here is for me is to NOT shout ‘Electronic GPUs For LH Flights’ in a crowded ‘blogosphere’, especially when basing my announcements on what I perceived to be factual and accurate information from an airline.
The next time I talk about it will be when I can point to screen shots proving that the process is finally in place….
