April 18, 2007 – Building a Business to Compete

Hi, it's Glenn, and I'm calling today from Chicago.

Every two weeks I send a letter to our board of directors that provides them with a detailed update on the business activities at the company, as well as serving to keep them up to date on our competitors and relevant external issues of the marketplace.

This week on the call, I'd like to speak to several of the items that I mentioned in my letter to our board of directors last Friday, which specifically focus on the work across United to improve our ability to respond to the competitive environment and to meet the needs of our customers.

Last week, the new premier lobby opened in San Francisco to good customer and employee feedback. The premier lobby is the latest in a series of improvements we're making in the airport environment for our Global Services, United First, 1K and United Business customers. Through this significant enhancement, we are reorganizing our lobbies, creating specific check-in areas for our premium travelers, to provide segmented service to ensure our customers' experience is faster and that is more consistent. Premier lobby is the next step in our customer experience work that began late last year with new premium boarding procedures, which are now in place in San Francisco, Washington Dulles and are rolling out at O'Hare, Denver and LAX.

In the area of sales, we are making excellent progress with our new corporate accounts. Customers from Motorola, Baxter and Allstate are signing up for and they are enjoying the benefits of the Mileage Plus program, and the new accounts are performing ahead of our expectations. Motorola travelers are regular guests on our aircraft flying between Chicago and Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo and Sao Paolo.

To ensure these customers are getting the best experience on our aircraft, we have initiated a continuous improvement project to improve cabin condition. The team responsible is addressing the reliability of our onboard equipment and the efficiency of our repair procedures to ensure that we are fixing broken items as quickly as possible. The project is designed to address specific feedback from customers on seat comfort and inflight entertainment workability.

Our ability to respond to the competitive marketplace extends beyond our customer-facing efforts. We are also reengineering our work behind the scenes in groups as diverse as strategic sourcing, scheduling and human resources. All are undergoing transformative projects that are aimed at driving more efficiency and better results. In Scheduling, both the domestic and international teams are using continuous improvement tools to streamline their processes and ultimately produce the schedule more accurately, with less rework, more quickly.

It is this ongoing focus on improvements in the everyday business across the airline that will result in a more effective, more competitive company that is more efficient for us and that creates a better experience for our customers.

Last week, we began rolling out Business Education training courses to our front-line, salaried and remaining management employees. Many of our employees at United came prepared to participate in the training together with their colleagues, and our facilitators worked hard to meet their expectations in every session. I want to thank them on the call for the energy and enthusiasm they bring to the day and to the experience, and for helping our participants work through the training sessions.

With Business Education, we believe it is important for all of us to take advantage of the forum to discuss the priorities we have as a company, to ensure we all understand the role we play in bringing about our own success and to understand that it is not going to be handed to us, and to talk about the issues we are facing in a very competitive, if not hypercompetitive, market environment.

The training is designed to be collaborative, and to encourage dialogue and interaction. It is one critical step in ensuring we can compete more effectively going forward, but of course it is only one step. We will continue to improve our products as we have outlined in our business plan, including our new premium seating for business and first class. We will focus on improving the service we provide to our customers and ensure that we all have the tools we need to deliver that service.

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.