On American’s Q4 2016 earnings call at the end of January, J.P. Morgan industry analyst Jamie Baker asked American’s Chief Integration Officer (Bev Goulet), which tasks remained on her to-do list. Here’s a transcript of his question and her response:
Jamie Baker
And the second question for Bev. Could you just outline with a little bit more granularity, and feel free to geek out if you want to, what are the relevant integration exercises that are yet to take place and what’s the approximate timing and approximate risk of each one, or associated with each one?
Bev Goulet
Well, Jamie, you know me well enough to know that I like to geek out. But I will try to…
Jamie Baker
We’ve known each other a while.
Bev Goulet
Really three major projects left to get done. First of all is getting our flight attendants into a common system. Hard at work on that right now. It’s a complicated matter. We are essentially taking an LUS contract and modifying the LAA system to accommodate it. But a lot of really good work going on right now. You know, we don’t have a firm plan yet, but we are optimistic within the next 12-plus months we ought to see something there. Also putting in a state-of-the-art HR and payroll system, again a lot of work there when you consider that it covers 650,000 people or so. And then finally we don’t have our tech ops organization integrated yet. And that is a long-term process, best case probably another three to four years.
Jamie Baker
Okay, very good. Thanks to both of you. I appreciate it. Good luck.
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2 comments
American’s technology is worst in class. The customer facing website and app are some of the worst on the planet. I just booked a ticket on Scoot Airlines using their app, but I cannot do that on American. Delta and United have apps with extensive booking features. I don’t think the US Airwyays people understand M-Commerce (They never did). Its sad to see the plans don’t involve in the short run. MCE still not on hundreds of planes, still major issues with Upgrades, poor catering teams (another flight today with no catering that was suppose to have Breakfast) American has so many customer facing issues to fix and doesn’t give a crap about any of them.
Agree. Surprised she did not mention MCE. The US fleet is a laugh offering just exit and bulkhead rows throughout narrow and wide bodies. And yes, IT is pretty bad. Not only can we not request SWU upgrades online, we can’t even see if our request via an agent actually went through and we’re waitlisted. Even more frustrating is not being able to see what mileage/spend a flight segment/booking will earn when searching for flights. (UA provides this information under each flight option.) And the limited search and booking of awards on more than half OneWorld and other partners is absurd. While AA/US has avoided some of the worst operational issues UA/CO experienced (and made me decide to move over to AA), these items make me question whether to stay or more on (along with changes to AAdvantage and downgrading of ExecPlat benefits).