United Airlines Highlights Failures While Promising That It Will Improve

After again blaming the carrier's troubles on integration challenges after the 2010 United Airlines-Continental Airlines merger, United's senior executives outlined a series of a initiatives Tuesday they said will help woo back lucrative business travelers and increase earnings. "We lost share in our domestic markets, and as our capacity shrank in the four years following the merger," United CEO Oscar Munoz said on a conference call with analysts. "A combination of all these factors led to a declining share of premium customers, which in turn contributed to our consistent underperformance to peers. Acknowledging where we went wrong is an important step in our recovery." Munoz, who took over from former CEO Jeff Smisek in September 2015, has much work ahead. Before the merger, United was often among the industry's better revenue performers, with the carrier regularly earning more from ticket sales than