Gargoyle

OLCI gets us a drink coupon. I never use all my PM coupons in a year anyway, so that is irrelevant.

Doesn't OLCI also take us off the upgrade list until such time as we arrive at the airport and check-in, or am I mistaken about this? I've avoided OLCI when my upgrade hadn't yet cleared for this reason.

humanoid94

The free drink is nice, but the priority bag tags is actually also an enhancement for Delta. Previously you only got priority bag tags when traveling on an interntional trip. This expands it to domestic (and reports are they actually work...). Back in the NW days, we used to get priority bag tags even for domestic trips so this brings back an old benefit.

itsaboutthejourney

This may not appear to be a big deal, but I find the gesture and feature very important. ^^

Now, if we could get the old NW style 1,000 bonus for missed u/g's we'd really be talking

publicmsu

I guess that does just confirm what I remembered from my days of gold on NWA. I've not once found priority tags on luggage to be of any benefit, on any airline.

FetePerfection

In my experience OLCI didn't effect my upgrade - it simply showed me where I stand in the UG order. Am I wrong?

I agree DL needs to do something to give elites a reason to continue their loyalty and although these changes are small, at least they're something.

DLdweeb

I believe this is correct - OLCI does not affect your chances for a gate upgrade.

avflyer

SMI

Thanks for the update and I for one appreciate this. Regarding the above post, I for one hope that the team will succeed soon.

That said, basic low-level availabilty as others have posted is simply not available on DL metal when one would expect it should be. Perhaps the award search engine is less broken than revenue management. For example, I am looking at multiple far out dates to AMS from NYC in BE - simple booking. EF is showing all planes - all classes with wide open availability (no surprise - dead of winter) and while KL has 100K seats, DL's are 200K and just like KL, they have 2 flights out of NYC to AMS.

Denolloyd

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Correct.

Marylou

So everybody above FO will now board in Zone 1 no matter where they're sitting? Beautiful.

I have stewed about this since I first read it and now I think I see what's going on.

They've heard all the grousing over not getting upgrades so they've decided to make F less appealing by giving the non-upgraded elites everything the paying (are you listening?) and upgraded F travellers have except the actual seat.

With half the plane boarding in Zone 1, you will now see what WN was like before they institued the numbered boarding system. You will also see more Y pax bags in the F overhead bins.

This is a recipe for disaster. Why not just let F board in 1, your top tier in 2, and kick the lowly FO to zone 3 if you must, but please, think this through before you mess it up royally.

Winkdaddy

It would be interesting to know what the average percentage of medallions per flight are FOs. Its most likely the highest percentage of all the medallions. So if you push them to Zone 2, then I would think that it would mean over 50% of the medallions just got pushed to zone 2? If true, then zone 1 really might not be as crowded as some think. However of course for medallion heavy flights this would not hold true.

DiscoPapa

Exactly.

Zone 1 = F/J pax, DM, PM, and GM.
Zone 2 = FO (plus a few straggling ST elites)

This sounds like it's going to be a mess...

jrmcrm

Are Y passengers allowed to use F bins?

Marylou

Very. If any employees are lurking, I would love to see a couple of random load checks.

gt_croz

SMI,

Thanks for the great info and responses to the posts. The drink/snack coupon for a missed upgrade is a wonderful idea and caught me totally by surprise. Any chance you can get ATL to actually enforce their security line?

As for the DM, PM, GM boarding in Zone 1, I like the upgrade but I can't help but feel like the F experience will be a bit cheapened. Zone 2 is basically just Silver Medallion now. I guess it would have been too offensive to FOs to have it be Zone 1 = F, Zone 2 = DM, PM, GM, Zone 3 = FO, Zone 4 & 5 = general boarding?

As a GM I have to say I'm overall quite pleased with this program. I'm dreading the gate lice situation though.

Marylou

There is no printed policy against it and you'll hear different FAs give different answers. (Yes, I've asked.) I've seen one and only one instance of a FA pulling down a Y bag from the F bin. I've pointed out Y bags before and usually they just shrug.