Hi, it's Glenn, and it's Thursday the 15th of February.

Today I've asked Cindy Szadokierski, our general manager at O'Hare, to join me on the call to lend her perspective to the conversation we started on the call last week with Terry Brady from Dulles.

As you'll recall, Terry gave us some insight on the opportunity and the challenges presented by the work under way to enhance the customer check-in and boarding experience at Dulles. Cindy and her team are just beginning that effort at O'Hare, and I have asked her to focus today on how the implementation is taking shape at United's largest hub.

In one other piece of news this past week, the company received official approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation to fly from Washington to Beijing nonstop. This approval gives more meaning to Terry and to his team's efforts. The facility upgrades, process efficiencies and service improvements, coupled with our new international routes at their airport, make quite a statement to our customers about the commitment they can expect from us when they travel through Washington Dulles.

With that, I'll turn it over to Cindy for more about the experience we are building for our customers at O'Hare. Cindy, over to you.

Cindy:

Thanks, Glenn. As you know, we are in the very early stages of the premium roll-out effort at O'Hare, but the team is already working not only tirelessly but also cross-functionally to improve processes designed to better our customers' overall experience -- this is not just a customer service initiative.

We are using continuous improvement tools across the entire station to review current processes and develop future state designs to enhance our customers' experience throughout the station. From the ground equipment shop to facility improvements, our team is focused on the entire experience for our customer. Our ramp and baggage teams, with the help of our colleagues at WHQ, have made significant progress in developing new running and delivery methods. Every day, they continue to peel back the onion just a little bit more in order to get to the root causes of delivery issues with priority bags. And trust me, we have many. But Glenn identifying issues and making them transparent is critical to our success -- it really is the only way we will ever get better.

As we concentrate on our core operational metrics such as on-time, STAR, and baggage, we must continue to put the customer at the heart of everything we do, and the premium roll-out is just a part of our evolution. We introduced the work to our managers just last week and they have already begun to adapt the learnings from San Francisco and Dulles to Chicago. They also started to think about how we can integrate this new effort with all of the other continuous improvement work under way at O'Hare.

But critical to the success of premium check-in and boarding will be the role our leaders play. We must take every opportunity to engage all leaders at all levels throughout the process. And I really mean all of us -- leads, service directors, supervisors, managers and me -- we must consider what we can do better for the customer, and how we can remove obstacles that stand in the way of our employees serving our customers, whether it be in the lobby, at the gate, on board the aircraft, in the garage or in the bag room.

Ultimately, every employee in every position has to understand what the customer needs and how each of us is best positioned to serve those needs. We know there will be many challenges along the way, whether it is with our facility, with buy-in from our employees or with many unforeseen things. But I have so much confidence in the team at O'Hare to execute, that I know there will not be a challenge that we cannot overcome. I think the leadership's team first response after the kick-off meeting of “Excellent, why has it taken so long? -- let's get started tomorrow” is just a great example of the genuine excitement and desire to make this endeavor successful and to make a difference in the eyes of our customer.

So, Glenn, the long and short of it is: we are ready. We're tackling the issues we'll face here at O'Hare, collaboratively working together with our resources from WHQ and taking advantage of the learning that's already happened at those stations that went before us to ensure that the customer is truly at the heart of all we do.

Back to you, Glenn...

Glenn: Thanks very much, Cindy. We are doing a great deal of work as a company to transform the customer experience, and the work that you have shared with us -- ensuring that every individual understands the importance of the interaction with the customer and how important the quality of service is during that interaction -- is just as critical as all of our financial investment in products and in new processes.

We recognized the importance of our collective efforts to provide a good experience to our customers this week with our distribution of Success Sharing checks for the fourth quarter. We met our reliability goal, we came within one-tenth of a point of meeting our customer satisfaction goal, and we exceeded our cost goal for the quarter. Overall, our performance resulted in a payout equal to 99 percent of our target. As I have previously mentioned on the call, the annual Success Sharing and Profit Sharing payments will be made after the first quarter.

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