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Old Apr 13, 2014, 9:55 pm
  #37  
GUWonder
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Watchlisted by the prejudiced, en route to purgatory
Programs: Just Say No to Fleecing and Blacklisting
Posts: 102,103
Originally Posted by lwildernorva
Wow, I was just misunderstood (and I helped you misunderstand me).

Or, the disadvantages of internet reporting, especially when unlike newspapers, you're the one in charge of writing the headlines--that led people to misunderstand (?) the point you were really trying to make.

Despite my criticism in this thread, I like VFTW, but this is now just backing and filling as a result of being way behind the curve on this story. And, no real reason to be behind it, because as we all expected, there would be some changes in the AA program as Parker and the gang moved in, but the real story here was that given the expectation of changes, the changes were dropped with no real notice.
The real story is that the "new AA" has already hit its customers with a far worse devaluation of the program without any real notice -- that of cutting back big time on sAAver award space for various routes in economy class too on AA metal for dates on/around "peak" travel dates. While a bunch of the more vociferous FTers, bloggers and most deeply-vested FFP customers are most concerned about premium cabin redemption, most FFP participants have historically redeemed for economy class travel and those are probably still the plurality of award tickets issues. And yet the clarion call from the more informed customers is about no advance notice and is about changes to the kind of awards/award features that most FFP customers had no clue even existed. There's a sort of irony there.

These programs are still mass market programs, and so alienating the mass market is marginally more risky for program operators than nailing those redeeming for premium cabin and Byzantine-rule-maximizing award tickets. FTers should be expecting worse hits and should be expecting less/no advance notice from the US airlines when it comes to FFP. It's going to be ugly -- especially on the redemption side -- more for us than the average FFP customers. It's going to be interesting to see how the bloggers adjust to that reality.

Last edited by GUWonder; Apr 13, 2014 at 10:00 pm
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