United Airlines spent the better part of the last decade as a reliable punchline. Bumped passengers, viral incidents, and customer service that seemed almost engineered to frustrate. If you flew United in the 2010s, you have a story.
So I want to give credit where it is due, and I mean it genuinely: something has shifted. This is not a happy accident or a PR repositioning. It looks like the result of a deliberate cultural push led by CEO Scott Kirby and former Chief Customer Officer Linda Jojo. Though Jojo retired in January 2025, her strategic fingerprints are all over the current operation. She continues to follow the airline's progress closely and remains one of its most vocal public supporters, cheering on the successes she helped set in motion.
Boarding That Does Not Treat You Like Cattle
The WILMA system, window seats first, then middle, and then aisle, sounds like something an operations consultant would dream up. Maybe it was. But the effect is that you stop being the person who has to stand up seven times in twenty minutes while strangers squeeze past with their carry ons. It is a small thing. It is also a signal: we thought about what this feels like for you, not just how to fill the plane faster.
Actually Telling You What Is Going On
For years, airline delay notifications were a masterclass in saying nothing useful. "Your flight has been delayed." Great, thanks. Now what?
Under Linda Jojo's direction, United started using generative AI to send real explanations. They share the actual reason for the delay, radar images, and real time updates. It is exactly the information you would want. It is the kind of detail a gate agent would share if they had time to talk to every passenger one by one. Using AI to do that at scale is not replacing a human interaction. It is the closest thing to one you can deliver to three hundred people simultaneously. That is the right use of the technology.
The Gate Agent Who Knows Your Name
This is the one that catches people off guard. As passengers scan their boarding passes, agents have started greeting them by name. It takes a second to register. In an industry where you are a seat number and a confirmation code, being called by your actual name at the gate is quietly disorienting in the best way. You are a guest, not just the next body in line.
Fine Print That Does Not Feel Like A Trap
Simplified cancellations. No change fees. These get written up as competitive moves, and they are. But they are also a statement. Scott Kirby has pushed the airline toward a model where revenue comes from loyalty rather than penalties. This means burying gotchas in the fine print stops being a revenue strategy and starts being what it always was: a way of treating customers as marks. Removing those hurdles is a choice. It is a visible one.
Turning Lost Luggage Into Something Less Awful
The AirTag integration will not make your bag arrive on time. But it changes what it feels like when your bag does not arrive. Instead of standing at a counter being told "we will look into it," you can see where the bag actually is. You are in the loop rather than in the dark. That is not a small thing if you have ever stood at baggage claim watching the carousel go around one more time.
Does Any Of This Actually Matter?
It turns out treating people like humans is also good business. Since United began rolling out these changes, the numbers have been hard to ignore. They saw 53.7 billion dollars in operating revenue in 2023, net income of 3.1 billion dollars in 2024, and record revenues of 59.1 billion dollars in 2025. Q1 2026 revenue was up 10.6 percent over the prior year. You can argue about causation, but the direction is clear and it has been consistent.
None of this is a reinvention. United still has bad days. But there is a through line in everything they have done that I think is worth naming: each change required someone to ask what this feels like for the passenger rather than just how do we move this passenger through the system. That question sounds obvious. Most companies never actually ask it.
That is the whole Human Talk argument. It was true in 2008 and it is still true now. The airlines and the brands that figure it out tend to be the ones still standing.
