00:13:25 · John Collison, Scott Kirby, Ben Thompson
[00:13:25] S1: These surprises are light product touches are quite important. [00:13:27] S0: Yeah. And that's another one that AI makes possible to do things like that that wouldn't have been possible. To know who you are, you know, like, you know, know what you want to drink. You know, do you want a, you know, want your normal genitin? What is your excellent wine selection? Yeah, you want your ginit? I don't think we have ginit on the airplanes, but now. [00:13:46] S1: We'll work on that. I have a question on [00:13:47] S2: this surprise and delight because that is a great thing. You show up and United delivers something I didn't expect. Yeah. The question is, how do you handle that becoming a feature? So, like, I was traveling this summer and my flight was delayed out of Madison due to a maintenance issue. But I'm like, it's gonna be super tight in Denver, connection saver's gonna save me. And I... Gates were next to each other. I wasn't... I was totally relaxed about it. And then I get there and the flight had already closed. I walked to the gate. They closed it early and taken off. I'm like, if American Airlines does that, I don't care. It's my expectation. Yeah. I was kind of crushed. Yeah. Because I, like, so you're surprising like feature. Yeah. But I'd already internalized it as you do this amazing thing. [00:14:26] S0: Yeah. And And you're such [00:14:28] S2: a large airline. How do you, like, it's hard to do had,
00:14:28 · Ben Thompson, Scott Kirby
[00:14:28] S2: a large airline. How do you, like, it's hard to do had, [00:14:30] S0: you know, we've, we have to get really good at communicating on it. A couple things. First, on something like that, have to get really good at communicating. The seatback screens now are going be helpful too. We're going to tell you that, and we're going to put it on the screen. So, the seatback screen today is completely divorced from the app. Tomorrow, once we take it over, they're gonna be the same. And so we're not gonna just have to text you about your... We're gonna text you and tell you, you know, exactly where it is. And if something changes, like what probably happened on that flight is it got delayed by air traffic control. Right. And the time, we didn't have time to hold for it. Oh no, it was one [00:15:02] S2: those things where like I knew, I understand the complexity Yeah, of right. It was just, I was kind of looking at myself like, why am I disappointed here? I'm like, [00:15:08] S0: oh, no, no, you shouldn't be disappointed. Because what we should do is communicate with you really well on that. Another cool thing that I hope we're going to have rolled out actually, well, we're going roll it out pretty soon. I've told them I want it done by Christmas, for Christmas twelve because of weather at Christmas. Normally if there's a weather delay coming on one of your flights, all airlines, including United, send you a text that says, Oh, there may be weather in Denver tomorrow. And like, great. [00:15:37] S2: What you supposed to Can I do my fingers?
00:15:37 · Ben Thompson, Scott Kirby, John Collison
[00:15:37] S2: What you supposed to Can I do my fingers? [00:15:38] S0: Yeah, yeah. Like what can you do? [00:15:39] S1: Yes, it's December in Denver. Yeah. I'm [00:15:41] S2: aware. Bring your little shot of anxiety
00:15:41 · Ben Thompson, Scott Kirby
[00:15:41] S2: aware. Bring your little shot of anxiety [00:15:42] S0: before So your what we're doing today, it already have started is when we say that, we say, Here's other options for flights that you can just switch to. You can stand by for this one if you want, or there's seats available on this one. What we're going to do is send you the screen. On the screen it's going to say, Your flight to Denver has a 41% of being impacted by weather. If you switch to the earlier flight, it's only a 12%. The later flight is a 3% so that you can have some intelligence about making decisions. But the point on like how do we like keep wowing customers is a really important one. So, two years ago the end of the year officer meeting, I told our officers that their job is wow. And they all looked at me like, What the hell does that mean? And like we, our job is to do things that a customer gets there, frequent flyer that gets on the airplane says, Wow, I've never seen that before. And by the way, we get credit for that one time. I know that. And then we owe them another They should put that in the bank and we should owe them. And it's a cultural that means like you can't ever rust, you can't be complacent, you can't, like what are you doing that's new, that's cool? Because I want every cool thing that we do, a customer to take that for granted and you should take it for granted and we do something to surprise you, you know, in the future. And that's cultural to try to do.
00:17:01 · John Collison
[00:17:01] S1: Ben has a theory that I like, is that all of the top global airlines lists are just totally missing the point. It's like people talk about benchmarking in AI where people are kind of optimizing for the wrong things. All the top global airlines which feature heavily kind of the Asian and Gulf airlines, you know, do so because they have, like, really nice meals and very well coy flight attendants and, you know, all these things. Whereas what you actually care about is the airline having really good tech. So you have things like Connection Saver where it can rebook you if you I'm 100%
00:17:30 · Scott Kirby
[00:17:30] S0: with you. I think those airlines do a good job. And like I say schedule's the number one reason people pick an airline. But everything else matters for brand loyal customers and it's service, product reliability, and technology. And the Asian and Middle East carriers do better than The U. S. Airlines on product for sure and probably service too. I think we do a really good job but they have different cultures for service. They do better on that. But I think technology is the differentiator and United... That's why I now believe that United in totality is the best airline in the world and it's because of technology. And it's like it's exponentially getting better. Know, things like being able to do this for customers when there's a delay and tell them what's going on. We started it this summer and we'll get this... AI allows us to institutionalize this. But if you're going to have a delay like sending customers weather radar maps. And like in Chicago, there was a day where the weather was over the horizon, but you had to fly, it was sunny at the airport, but you had to fly through this line of thunderstorms and so the routes were closed. You couldn't. So we're like, Why? We'll just find outside. We sent half the people the normal weather delay, which said, Think you're lying. Because it's sunny outside. Like, You must be lying to me. And we sent half of them a picture with the radar map and you have to fly through this line of thunderstorms and the route's closed because it's unsafe. The people with one hour delay, I think the numbers were negative 60 NPS on the normal way of sending it, plus 60 when we sent them a picture of the map. 120 difference.