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United Airlines bringing 165 call center jobs back home

by Scott Carmichael (RSS feed) on Feb 11th 2009 at 10:00AM

Here is a bit of feel good news from the travel world - hidden between all the bad news was an announcement from United Airlines that they were going to move 165 call center positions from their International Call Center back to the USA.

The new jobs will be added to their existing centers in Chicago and Honolulu.

This news is great for several reasons - it creates new (and badly needed) jobs here in the US, and it means you can call the call center without having to explain everything twice.

No offense to the hard working people in their International Call Center, but if I'm completely honest, it was always quite the hassle to deal with them, especially if it involved anything a little more complicated than a simple itinerary change.

Of course - with good news also comes some bad news; none of these new workers will be anxiously awaiting your reservations. All the new positions will be used to respond to complaints sent to the airline.

In fact - United Airlines is so tired of people picking up the phone to complain, that as of April 2009, you will no longer be able to call them with your rants, and complaints will only be accepted through email or regular mail.

So much for progress.

Filed under: Airlines

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

nzm Feb 11th 2009 3:11PM

Tom:

I'm not sure that the closure of the Indian call centre means that 165 new jobs will be created back in the US. The article in the above link mentions that 165 phone reservations agents in the UA Honolulu and Chicago centres will be cross-trained to answer email complaints as well as handle phone reservations.

In other words, the existing US-based UA employees in Hawaii and Chicago are now being "asked" to do more work - unless the recent economic downturn has meant that there are less phone reservations coming into UA call centres and has given their agents more free time. :-)