A December of best-evers

As we close the book on 2023 and begin a new year, United Airlines has incredible successes to celebrate. During the last two weeks of the month, we flew 8.2 million customers, averaging 483,000 each day, making this our busiest holiday travel period ever — and even more impressive, we broke records galore!

As we reflect on the month, and our entire year, we can toast to the incredible work our team put in to get our customers home for the holidays and to make our operation stronger than ever, while flying more aircraft than ever in United history. We had a banner year, and December exemplifies how far we’ve come!

While the last two weeks of the month were busy, we flew a total of 14,300,000 customers, which is the most ever in the month of December.

Compared to history, we also saw our lowest-ever cancel rate for the month of December, and it was our third-best month of all-time. CD:00 (measurement we use for flights that are on time or early, plus those that we intentionally hold for a few minutes for customers via our ConnectionSaver tool) was 73.5% and cancel rate was 0.34%.

For the second half of December (Dec. 15-31), we had the most on-time flights. Our CD:00 was 70.7%, A:00 (arrival within 0 minutes of scheduled time) was 69.7% and A:14 (arrival within 14 minutes of scheduled time) was 83.4%. We ranked second in on-time departures and canceled flights out of the largest eight U.S. carriers.

We also came in No. 1 in mainline STAR:00 and had our best-ever December with 84%. STAR:00 takes into account departures that are before 9:00 a.m. and have a minimum ground time of four hours. Starting the day strong sets us up for success for the remainder of the day. And our continued focus on CD:00 resulted in fewest number of customer misconnects, setting a December record.

Some great hub accomplishments for December:

• DEN, EWR, SFO and ORD had their best-ever CD:00.
• DEN, EWR and ORD had their best-ever A:00 and A:14.
• IAD had its best-ever A:14.
• SFO had its best-ever A:00.

Overall, we had an incredible month and end of year between two of our busiest holiday travel seasons in our history. We faced everything head on and came out on top, setting us up for an amazing future.

Where we succeeded (full December):

What we’re proud of (full December):

• Best ever December seat cancel rate at 0.34%.
• Best-ever December STAR:00 at 84%.
• Best-ever December CD:00 73%.
• Best-ever December A:00 at 71%.
• Best-ever December?open minimum equipment list (MEL) rate.
• Best-ever December MBR (mishandled baggage rate) at 7.6
• Best-ever December customer misconnect rate at 2%.
• Best-ever December widebody CD:00.
• And all of these records were set during our busiest holiday travel period when we flew 8.2 million passengers.

Looking forward

• We had some big wins in November and December, and this was during two of our busiest holiday travel periods in our history. Starting off the year with this momentum will propel us into the new year.?
• Since August, this was some of our best performance ever. We’ve been flying the most customers ever, and as we continue to add new and bigger aircraft, we are still excelling and setting more and more records.