Hi, this is Glenn and it is Tuesday, the 16th of March and we're calling from World Headquarters.

In our last call, Pete McDonald and I talked about our focus on continuous improvement and on cost competitiveness, and how they both allow us to continue to make necessary investments in our customers and in our products.

So this week, I have invited John Tague to join me to talk about these investments and how they are helping us re-engage our customers in what we all know to be an increasingly tough marketplace.

Our customers' perception of United is the sum total of all of their experiences. We are doing good work in many respects, but we really shouldn't have any illusions about how much better we need to be in order to earn our customers' continued loyalty and to eventually restore this company to a position of leadership in this industry.

John and his organization are very focused on ensuring that the value and the experience that we offer to our customers, and to those that are not yet our customers, are just what they should be. So John, over to you.

John Tague:

Thanks, Glenn. With Glenn's support and significant encouragement, we continue to work hard on changing and improving the customer experience at United, both as expressed by what you deliver every day, as well as the products and services they receive through programs such as Mileage Plus.

Clearly our industry is in an extremely challenging environment and you need look no further than Glenn and Pete's call last week as to just how challenging that is and what that means that we need to do on the cost side of the equation.

However, those challenges have not created an opportunity for us to bypass our customer expectations.

We need to remember that we are still competing in a very aggressive marketplace, with very significant competitive offerings being faced up and arrayed before our customers each and every day.

So our customers simply will not accept that our need for efficiency and cost control means less for them. That is a tough market, which we must manage in today and in the years ahead.

Our portfolio is an expression of different costs for different revenue outcomes for each of these customer purposes. The most recent addition is Ted, where we may fly a customer for 99 dollars, who has a basic expectation of the services that we provide but certainly expects us to excel at what we are promising with the Ted brand. The same customer could be on a first-class trip to Hong Kong.

We very often forget that our customers are people who have very different buying habits based upon the purpose of their trip today, and are not purely leisure or business travelers, but very often our high value business travelers are also our very, very tough, price-minded leisure travelers. So we can't simply fit people in one box or the other. They are whole customers with whole different buying patterns and we have to compete to meet the totality of their needs.

In order to be the airline that people choose to fly time and time again, we've got to communicate effectively about that value, and we have a strategy that is focused on doing that. But it's important to note that this strategy, while it's been rolling out and will continue to roll out, is really about the tough work we need to do over the course of many, many years to regain the executional leadership to create a superior customer experience for the folks that fly on our airplanes day in and day out.

Some of the most visible work that you and our customers see is in the Marketing Communications area, and we've taken some significant steps forward there recently.

We began a process of substantial investment with Glenn's support last year in the May/June timeframe to send a strong message to the marketplace that United was going to be a successful survivor who they could depend upon for their future travel needs. That basic message was delivered to the marketplace and our results have been successful as it's related to that.

However, we wanted to step it up more than a notch and develop a campaign that emotionally connected with our customers and the bond and the strength of that connection with our brand.

We came up with a program and a plan and it's called, "It's time to fly." Those are simple words, but they're important words to us and our customers on many levels.

Most basically, it means it's time to put the past behind us and to move forward. To move forward as an airline and to move forward as a customer in an industry that relies upon airlines. Saying that when you're ready to go, we are, and that good things happen when you use air travel to bring you closer to new personal experiences and closer to developing business for you and your company.

We're aggressively proceeding with this campaign and it's received an unprecedented critical review that's been very positive both from national and local press, as well as industry experts.

One of the most visual expressions of United moving forward in a positive, crisp way is leaving behind the gray livery of our past and moving into a new livery that is clean and crisp, but yet very, very respectful of the history that United is justifiably proud of.

But Marketing Communications, while visible, are just one component. We're also working hard across the airline to change the customer experience.

You're seeing that with the great work that's being done by Larry De Shon's group in Airport Operations, where we're continuing to roll out EasyCheck-in terminals across the U.S. And we're adding features that are very meaningful to our customers, such as re-booking missed flights, or upgrade utility across the EasyCheck-in units, or premium cabin sales, which brought in 43,000 dollars just in the first 10 days of their initiation.

We'll be adding more functionality to EasyCheck-in that will both enhance the customer experience and bring new revenue sources to United. We're also adding functionality to united.com, with a goal of having a customer be able to acquire any processing experience on line that they could obtain anywhere else at the airline.

That progress is being noted by our customers' record numbers of bookings in January, as well as site visits. That trend continues into February. We're enhancing Mileage Plus as one of the core marketing assets of the airline. While other airlines become more restrictive, we're delivering more value through what's been recognized as the industry-leading loyalty program.

We're bringing out commonality with Economy Plus across the fleet, with the Shuttle reconfigurations and the 777 reconfigurations giving added value to our most important customers. And in that same theme, we're investing in our premium products domestically and internationally, recognizing that either through loyalty and entitlement or through specific price paid, our premium customers have given us a significant financial contribution and deserve to be rewarded with a differentiated and exceptional product.

So we're working very hard in these areas and you'll see many, many more in the months and years to come, all intended to strengthen our portfolio and the customer experience that each one of our individual consumers experiences regardless of where they go, whether it's Ted, United Express or the Star Alliance. And we're doing great work in United Express to deal with some very significant challenges that we recognize and the substantial improvement that our customers demand and deserve.

All of these things together, and most importantly with your personal performance and the exceptional results that that's delivering, are part of the value proposition that we offer our customers, visibly through advertising, but most importantly through the efforts you make on the front line and the efforts we see behind the scenes in key areas such as Sales and Reservations.

Sales puts a whole lot of high-value, corporate-contracted volume on our airplanes through some very tough and sophisticated efforts, but it's another area that in our stewardship of United assets we're going to improve and generate higher returns to leverage the company going into the future. Most importantly, we're going to continue to exercise our international leadership and the franchise that we own at United. You've seen that reasonably with Beijing, Chicago-Honolulu, Caribbean and Latin America additions and there will be more in that area in the months ahead.

So, suffice it to say, we're doing the work in the short term and we're focused on what we will need to do in the long term, not just to become a shinier version of what we are today, but a whole new United. One that can clearly be recognized by all our constituencies as the world's best airline. Glenn?

Glenn:

Thanks, John. Much Appreciated.

John has given us all a sense for the breadth of hard work being done to ensure that we deliver on our promise to our customers and to all of our constituents, including all of you, our employees. The investments that he referred to in product and process improvements are important, and they're sensible and they're targeted. While some are more immediate in their results, and others are farther out in the future, they are going to take time to produce their full effect, but they are also going to take your best efforts.

In closing, I want to say that you play the most critical role in determining United's value to our customers -- just as John said -- through your personal interaction with them and the service that you provide for them every day whether you are taking reservations, fixing an engine or dispatching the planes. So keep up the good work and always be on the lookout for ways that you can help build on our promise to our customers and to one another. Let's continue to improve the relationship that we have with our customers at United.

In the weeks ahead we're going to have more guests on this call. We're going to have "Ted" Donohue on to talk about Ted and its progress. We're going to have Jane Allen join us to talk about initiatives on board. We're going to have Greg Hall join us while the board is out in San Francisco next week visiting the Maintenance facility, United Services now. And we are going to take a tour of his facility and meet his employees, spend some time understanding the transformation that is underway there, and we're going to take the opportunity while we are out there to have him join me on the call.

All of this I think is going to present to you, the employees of the company, that we are a team, a team here at world headquarters, a team throughout the organization and a team represented by about 60,000 people doing the best that we can to deliver the customer promise that John referred to in his remarks a moment ago. So, until next week, keep up the hard work -- we appreciate it very much -- and stay united.