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Online turbulence for merged airline

By STEVE HUETTEL
Published May 31, 2006

As senior citizen pop star Neil Sedaka reminds us, breaking up is hard to do.

But when it comes to an airline, calling it quits is a breeze compared to merging two carriers into one.

The new U.S. Airways last week took its first major step: combining the old U.S. Airways and America West Web sites and frequent flier programs.

Customers immediately encountered bumps online. The site didn't recognize city names or codes, responding that US Airways did not fly to its major hubs such as Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C.

Online check-in didn't work. Dividend Miles members had trouble accessing accounts, and when they did, thousands of recently earned miles were missing. The miles would show up by June 9, customer service agents assured them.

Art Pushkin spent a half-hour last week trying without success to book a flight to California. He still can't get past his Dividend Miles log-in page to see account details.

"They should have waited to until they got the site right,'' says Pushkin, a top-level elite flier with US Airways from Dix Hills, N.Y. "What was the big pressure?''

Most glitches were fixed in a couple of days, the airline says. Considering the complexity of merging millions of computer records, the launch "went as expected and actually quite well,'' said Travis Christ, vice president of marketing.

Frequent fliers on the popular on-line chat site FlyerTalk.com debated whether the airline blundered by springing an inadequately tested site on the public.

In fact, US Airways knew about the delay in posting Dividend Miles and anticipated other, unforeseen problems. But officials switched to the new site May 21 without telling customers to avoid overloading the system, Christ said.

"You would have launched a run on the bank,'' he said. "Any bumps we did have affected a small number of passengers.''

Technicians tested components of the new software. Unlike one built from the ground up, however, this system had to start working in real time once US Airways records were shipped into the America West computers, Christ said.

Airline reservation systems are among the most complicated in the world of retailing. Just this year, Frontier Airlines and AirTran Airways had to pull the plug on balky new Web sites.

US Airways faces particularly knotty problems. The old US Airways contracted out management of its Web site and frequent flier program, while America West did the work in-house.

The airlines also use different reservations systems. That's why you still see separate ticket counters at the same airport for US Airways and America West.

Combining reservations is the next big hurdle in the merger, scheduled for the first quarter of 2007. But it's not the last. The airlines still fly separate routes with their own planes, pilots and flight attendants.

US Airways must combine employee seniority lists before operating as a single carrier. That's a volatile issue for workers whose pay and work shifts are determined by their position on the seniority ladder.

The airline has been on roll lately, reporting a rare profit of $64-million this month for the first quarter of 2006. Its stock price has more than doubled to $44.61 per share since the merger last fall.

This is the first airline merger since online bookings became a major part of ticket sales, said Joe Brancatelli, an airline reporter and editor of JoeSentMe.com, a business travel Web site.

But he wonders what last week's stumble signals for how US Airways will handle the other big merger questions.

"They're getting to the hard stuff,'' says Brancatelli. "And it's not easy.''

Steve Huettel can be reached at huettel@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3384.

[Last modified May 31, 2006, 05:30:50]