Originally Posted by
lwildernorva
I thought the initial posts from OMAAT and VFTW were distinctly different. Lucky, the kid, pounded on AA almost immediately. Gary, who views himself as a go-to guy for FF programs (hey, I'm on WTOP, I'm in USA Today, I'm on ABC) missed the boat in his first post--AA changes awards you probably don't use, he trumpeted. Since then, he's been in catchup mode.
I try not to be an alarmist but hardly any blogger seems to view these changes as the harbinger of worse to come. While AA's 40K offseason economy awards to Europe have been reasonably available (and will likely disappear under the PAArker regime), US's Envoy options for 60K offseason have been mostly vaporware. And, while AA's biz to Europe during the summer has some AAnytime availability at 100K, US's has generally been at outrageous levels for years--265K ORF-GLA RT for most dates this summer has also been the norm the last few years I've checked.
While I think AA attempted to get out in front of these changes by making Suzanne Rubin available for interviews with select outlets, including OMAAT and VFTW, I don't think we've seen the end of this. I'm not about to dump my AA miles because I just don't panic about stuff like this, but I don't think the big changes are over.
Until a handful of years ago, Gary Leff had the kind of limited experience with AA that I would call him more of a FFP generalist than a reliable specialist on AA program matters. I think that still holds sort of true and may explain why he didn't think the OW Explorer and stopover award eliminations were that big a deal. And in fairness to him, or maybe not, these awards -- like most award types -- are not the mass marketed kind of awards that say the domestic US@25k miles roundtrip awards are.
I must say that journalists, much like bloggers, often are so interested -- wittingly or not -- in source-access/access-maintenance that they tend to go rather soft(er) on those whom they deal with more frequently when coming up with copy for "reporting" purposes. Often the sources want this kind of relationship and they "leak" or provide on-the-record access as a way to soften up reporting, to get facts buried or to put up trial balloons or otherwise lay the groundwork for the next move against a party. It happens in reporting/not-reporting on government/government personnel activities and it happens in industry-specific press with reporting/not reporting. This is no different. We are all prisoners of circumstance to some degree or another.
I have no doubt that what the "new AA" will do later this year or next is even worse -- far worse for consumers -- than what has been done by AA/US in 2013 or so far in 2014.