United removing 100 aircraft from its fleet, bye-bye Ted

United is reducing the size of its operation. Glenn Tilton, United’s chairman, president and chief executive, had this to say: “Today we are taking additional, aggressive steps that demonstrate our commitment to size our business appropriately to reflect the current market reality, leverage capacity discipline to pass commodity costs on to customers, develop new revenue streams and continue to reduce non-fuel costs and capital expenditures.”

What I like about that statement are the words, “current market reality.” I read that to mean fuel charges are skyrocketing and the price of travel is going up. In its press release that went out today, United says, ” With fuel at current prices, it creates more than a $3 billion challenge to overcome. United believes that these actions will offset that challenge by 2009, assuming the industry as a whole takes similar actions.”

Eighty planes will be out of the fleet by the end of 2008 with the remaining 20 out by the end of 2009. The result of these cuts will eliminate Ted service.

United also says that with reducing the size of the operation, they will also be cutting back on staff. They intend to cut 1,400-1,600 salaried and management employees and contractors including 500 job cuts that were previously announced.

— Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times Travel Deal Blogger

[Photo: flyted.com]

Permalink | E-mail | Print | Add to My Trips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 11:39 am by Jen Leo and is filed under Frequent Flier, News, Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.