Originally Posted by hummingbear

Maybe, maybe not. To your point, they certainly don’t seem very worried about it. From my perspective, this management’s aggressive growth strategy is at its face refreshing & has been received enthusiastically by many of our pilots. Having that wind at their backs would have been the perfect moment to sell us on a new standard of brand ambassadorship, which is- at least ostensibly- a fundamental tenet of their United Next plan. But where they’ve been quick to spend big money on fleet growth & route expansion, they’ve continued to drag their feet on this investment. What’s worse, they’ve become the victims of their own messaging. A couple months of earnest negotiations is not that long a timeframe; but after repeated promises of an industry leading contract in 2 weeks, to be fighting for the middle of the pack 2 months later feels like a crushing blow.

To me it feels like a big miscalculation that is going to cost them more in the long run than they are presently considering. The point you make about having seen this cycle multiple times in your tenure here nicely underscores what I’m saying. That cycle has given us decades of being little more than a frequent inconvenience and an occasional insult to our paying customers. If they really want to be the “biggest & best”, they have to do something fundamentally different; yet they (discouragingly) seem to be drawing from the same tired playbook that brought us the failures of decades past.