Originally Posted by
channa
I don't know about that. UA's hubs are in much more competitive environments than CO's, so CO can afford to get away with more than UA. CO has a stronghold on EWR, IAH, and CLE while UA has direct hub competition at LAX (AA/DL), DEN (F9) and ORD (AA).
As a result, UA has to be more sensitive to its Elite travellers, as they can more easily lose them. If you live in IAH, you're pretty much stuck on CO, no matter what they do to you (hence the 50% EQM rule on CO).
E+ can be considered a revenue generator. UA generated over $100 million last year on E+ buy-ups, not to mention the repeat business it generates because of customer satisfaction. People bash UA all the time, yet the UA Elites keep coming back for more. E+ is the main reason for this -- it's a tremendous fallback position in the event an upgrade fails to clear.
I might add that CO has an enormous stock of loyalty to fall back on. While I think its crazy given my experience (as I have noted I switched from CO back to UA) COs generally good labor and passanger relationships and the passanger first attitude I saw with former management gives CO some flexability. Their fliers are not about to bolt.
UA is in a different environment, and they have very little love for them by many of their fliers. They also have a lot more competition at their hubs and
rely upon their FF program to draw in fliers. While they are the biggest carrier at SFO, take away too many goodies and I'm going to be flying VX and AS and AA in a heartbeat
Ditto folks in ORD, and IAD is an airport that you try to avoid.
Ditto on E+ being the main driver. If UA took that away they would be toast in about 5 minutes. I bet you could take a poll and 90% of their elites would go elsewhere.
This said, I doubt UA gives CO elites e+ because what can CO give UA elites that is equivelent? Benifits have to go both ways, and an e+ seat is more expensive to have than a 31" pitch seat on CO.
I also don't see CO dropping two rows of seats out to add e+, they can't give up the revenue.
As such CO is in for a rough patch when NW upgrades go away, how many folks not in their hubs who used to (like I did in SFO) split my flying between NW and CO are now going to be happy having to be in e- on the replacement carrier for NW?