September 29, 2006 - Graham Atkinson appointed executive vice president and chief customer officer

Hi, it's Glenn.  It's Friday, and I'm calling from Washington, D.C.  We have just finished our September meeting with the board of directors where we discussed the company's strategic opportunities over the next five years as we continue to strengthen United's core business.  I want to focus today's call on announcements coming out of the meeting today.

Having successfully gone through our restructuring, we have put ourselves in a position to compete and succeed both in the domestic and international marketplace.  I look forward to working together with all of you to make the most of the opportunities that are ahead of us.  To that end, I have signed a replacement contract with the company and will continue on as president, chairman and chief executive officer through September 2011.

We have made important progress against our performance agenda to optimize our revenue, reduce our costs and improve our customer experience.  At our meeting this week, we continued our planning against our agenda, laying out clear business strategies and objectives for the board and for the executive team.

As important as the business discussions with the board is our ability and our commitment to deliver against those objectives for our shareholders and our customers.

To that end, accountability and continuity of management is key.  We have elevated Graham Atkinson to executive vice president and chief customer officer, reporting directly to me, along with the other executive vice presidents, Pete, John Tague and Jake Brace.  By elevating Graham Atkinson to executive vice president and chief customer officer, we have given the customer the same voice at the table as operations, revenue and finance, and now fully support our ambition to balance the needs of our customers, employees and investors.

Graham will be responsible for continuing all of the good work that John, Dennis Cary and a number of teams have begun to redesign our customer experience.  Graham is also charged with taking that work to the next level - leading the initiative across the company and working with the rest of the management team, providing tools and training and ensuring that we rapidly make the changes necessary to improve the service our customers receive. 

To tell us more about his new role, I'll now turn the call over to Graham. . .

Graham:
Thanks, Glenn.  So, our mission is to build a companywide, robust plan that defines our customers' experience every time they interact with us, and gives us a way to measure it effectively.  The customer experience team has done some really good research and foundational work around that mission already, but we still have a lot of work to do to change our customers' experience and to meet the expectations they have of us.  That's our challenge, and that's our opportunity.

When I look across the U.S. industry, we are doing as well as most of our domestic peers, which isn't a bad place to start.  But it's not aligned with our long-term strategic goal.  Our goal is to differentiate us from our U.S. competitors and to come much closer to our international peers in the quality of the experience we are delivering to our premium customers.  To deliver an experience that rivals those top international airlines, we still have a lot more work to do.

It means significantly shifting our focus as an organization.  We've talked for some time about putting the customer at the center of our decision making.  Our challenge is to begin to do that as an organization, to put substance behind that discussion.

My experience leading the Sales Division Transformation, in which we completely rebuilt the organization from the ground up over two years, will be very valuable as we continue the work in Customer Experience.  In large part, succeeding here is about the same principles: creating a plan to change processes and working with people to deliver a different kind of service.  We spent a lot of time on both in Sales, and the change process isn't easy.  It takes time and perseverance as well as the cooperation of everyone across the organization, but the results are well worth the effort.

To talk more about how we'll work together to get those results, I'll turn the call over to Pete McDonald.  Pete...

Pete:
Thanks, Graham, and congratulations on your promotion.  Graham's message is an important one.  No one organization can meet our customers' expectations alone.  It will take all of us working together to capture the opportunity we have in front of us.

In Operations, for many of our customers, we are the face of United.  So, we'll work closely with Graham and his team, and we will play a large role in delivering the experience that they will design.  We already have a lot of work under way to improve our customers' travel on our airline, and it starts with the basics.

From 2003 to 2005, we led the industry in operational performance.  We need to get back to the leadership position.  We spoke with the board today about a number of efforts that will get us back to the fundamentals: good on-time performance, low cancellations, bags delivered quickly and reliably, aircraft and facilities in good condition, equipment that works, courteous service.

We have to meet those basics without sacrificing the efficiency and productivity that we've gained in the last three years.  In recent months, we've reduced turn times and tightened up our block time in an effort to use our aircraft more efficiently, generate more revenue and gain more hours of flying time from our existing fleet.  Our work now is to preserve those gains and recapture our edge in performance.  By doing both, we can continue to get the benefits of additional revenue and flying time, as well as provide our customers with the performance they expect from us.

As we get the basics right, we must also build a better experience for our premium customers, one that is different from the one our customers are getting today from United and other U.S. carriers. We'll now continue with Graham on building an experience that meets those expectations and ultimately will drive our financial performance.

Glenn, back to you...

Glenn:
Thanks, Pete, and thanks also to Graham.  You remind us with your comments that we all have a great opportunity to dedicate ourselves to differentiating our company and our brand for our customers and providing them with the travel experience they deserve.

That's all for now on this call.  I'll be talking to you again soon.  Until then, stay focused on our customers, on one another... and stay united.