This is a pattern-bargaining industry, like railroads. You need to pay market to get a contract at all, and without contracts, you have a poor relationship with workers.
— Oscar Munoz
Everyone eventually matches or leapfrogs everyone else.
At the end of the day, the differential, I believe, on the airline space has got to be about the product and the service that you provide. And again, I can't express that enough. That comes from people. It is a people business, and my primary focus is to get our 84,000-plus people back aligned, back engaged, and back focused on our customer.
Clearly, on a visceral human front, I oppose any wall, anywhere, between any people - period.
If you fly and you look around today and you see our United family, you see them incredibly motivated and focused on making things right.
I was hired to make United better, and that's what we'll do.
I can't tell you how many thousands of small moments that I've had with employees in our company that have been nothing more than a one-on-one. I'll see the baggage-services person, he or she is by himself. I'll pull them off to the side and have a 15-minute conversation about their history, their life, that kind of thing.
We have such rigid rules, sometimes, that they don't have to be rules. They can be policies and procedures that can be adapted for the moment.
You forget sometimes that the people you're carrying are human.
We have not provided our frontline supervisors and managers and individuals with the proper procedures that would allow them to use their common sense.
It is important that we win back the trust of employees first, then customers.
To get our passengers where they want to go safely and happily requires thousands of us working together with a shared purpose of supporting each other in serving our customers.
In the telecommunications, consumer products, and railway businesses, there are very real consequences if you don't meet the consumer's needs and desires. There are also substantive rewards for doing so, and especially for exceeding customer expectations.
Simply put, we haven't lived up to your expectations... That's going to change.
United's 2015 earnings were one of the best in the company's history.
Everyone has images in their mind of what to expect from different groups.
I am thrilled to return full time to a job and the employees I love.
I feel most comfortable in the hangars and ramps.
I believe we must go further in redefining what United's corporate citizenship looks like in our society... and we intend to live up to those higher expectations in the way we embody social responsibility and civic leadership everywhere we operate.
We have some inherent cost and infrastructure issues that are difficult to deal with, no questions. From my perspective, we have to work on the revenue side primarily. We've lost some customers. We need to rebuild the trust with those customers and get them back.
Uncertainty always creates doubt, and doubt creates fear.
I think we need to communicate more effectively how we treat you with respect and dignity as a customer.
Clearly, nutrition is great. I was a vegan, so being an athlete and a vegan certainly sounds like it would be the right thing to prevent something like heart disease, but it's highly genetic.
For me, it's common sense to treat other people like you would like to be treated. Empathy is a broad concept, but how do you get there? People get there differently. I get there by truly building a little trust and connection. You'll tell me something, I'll act on it, and then that builds on itself.
It's a new era with regard to social media. It's just something that we have to adapt to and accept.
We're going to teach and broaden sort of the cultural impact of respect and dignity, regardless of where you're sitting. And that's why we've said once you've boarded an aircraft, we're not going to take you off except for safety and security.
I think my reaction to most issues is to get the facts and circumstances.
The airline industry has been closely watching, monitoring, exactly what the rail industry has done.
At United, I will dedicate myself to making our airline flyer-friendly.
We have significant work to be done. We have old, antiquated systems. Remember the 8-track tape player? Think of that as our core system, and we're living in a world where everybody has an iPhone.
We didn't have nine brands of cereal at home. We'd line up to fill our bowls from a giant vat of oatmeal.
Somewhere in the mix, we forgot the very critical people who deliver the service.
Our parents taught us to work hard and never forget our family roots, where we came from, and how much effort it took to get to where we are today.
United spent $1.2 billion repurchasing shares in 2015 and plans to spend $1.5 billion on share repurchases in the first quarter of 2016. We have a lot of positive momentum, but this is just the beginning.
Our employees and competitors thought we were docile. We want to be defiantly disruptive. I don't mean necessarily by launching price wars but by being the best at the basics - having the best customer service, the best on-time performance, the best coffee - in a thoughtful, not a testosterone-laced, way.
It is my mission to ensure we make the changes needed to provide our customers with the highest level of service and the deepest sense of respect. Ultimately, our actions will speak louder than words.
I think the hardest thing that, historically, the industry may have relied upon is that we can't control weather, we can't control air traffic control, and use that at the end of the day as an excuse. Things do happen - we know they happen. We don't exactly know when they are going to happen, but we should definitely be prepped.
It is a free world. It is a dynamic of our new day and age: technology is everywhere.
The process of overbooking is a complicated one. It's actually minimal. We, on certain flights, overbook by one or two people.
If I have any strength that would be considered above average, it is that I can read people.
It's so important that we tell customers what's going on as best as we can. And we're trying to do that. We don't often know ourselves, for so many different factors, but reliability, flexibility, and information are the three critical customer service orientations.
I think one of the things that, at least, I found out over - and many have in the industry - is that of all the customer service desires and needs, price is one of them.
We are deeply sorry for the loss of anything - from your luggage to, of course, a loved pet.
We are not going to put a law enforcement official onto a plane to take them off... to remove a booked, paid, seated passenger. We can't do that.
I am a first-generation college graduate, and I'm proud to say that most of my other siblings have college degrees as well. Our parents taught us to work hard and never forget our family roots, where we came from, and how much effort it took to get to where we are today.
Getting people where they want to go, reliably and happily, can make or break their ability to succeed in a work endeavor or to hug a family member at an important moment.
It's the human approach to customers that I want to bring back.
Communication and communication strategy is not just part of the game - it is the game.
Treating our customers and each other with respect and dignity is at the core of who we are, and we must always remember this no matter how challenging the situation.
We have to realize we have millions of human beings traveling on our equipment.
