Really, what kind of crack are they smoking in Fort Fumble? Can anyone site a business practices article, i.e. from a respectable business journal or magazine, that proposes and advances the idea that it makes sense to screw and piss off your customers? I was a business major undergrad (no MBA) but have never read any theory or suggestion that it makes sense to disenfranchise your customers, let alone your loyal one's in a bad economy. They need to be doing things that will encourage travel, and forget about the ideal of yester-year when they could sell more Y seats to a sizling .com economy that had more money than it knew what to do with.

Finally can anyone site another industry or type of company that has either considered or let alone put in to practice a strategy such as set forth in the first post of this thread? It seems that even household named name agencies, like the IRS, have rather recently made concertted efforts to be more customer centricly focussed. The majors really perhaps aught to be run out of business so that innovaters who take the customer experience more seriously thrive and survive, while those fixated on the past die off as the industry evolves.....survival of the fittest, etc. On a recent UA flight, they had on UA radio a guy talking about CEM (in lieu of CRM) which stands for customer experience management. The CEO of this company has written a book, do a search for customer experience management, and unlike CRM the premise of CEM is to always never take your customers for granted, constanly take feedback for improvement from the customers, and strive to "wow" your customers at evry "touch point" that they have with your business. How does it "wow" a customer if you now have to pay for standby, and receive vague threats (not any worse than a criminal) that miles will be taken away, etc. Why doesn't whatever executive(s) that dreamed this up post under their own name? And why does some mysterious employee of Randy bow to this extent to the airlines. I would have preferred Randy's operations just post what they heard, and put a statement that, we take no position on this and will let the community decide what it is worth or what you will do about it. Why is Randy getting in the business of doing the airlines dirty work? US Airways certainly has the capability to send an email to all DM members with their policy statements.

Finally of the population of DM members, what percentage actually go stay more than 5,000 miles out of this thread? Talk about having your priorities in dis array. Your losing customers and money, in Chatper 11, and you try to (week after week) dream up things that will offend your customers, and make them speak negatively about your carrier that probably already is not viewed favorably as a result of Chapter 11 by the average person who flies infrequently. Instead of using your customers as marketing partners, you do things to anger them, and perhaps make them discourage their personal and business associates from flying US. And all the while, you naively think that this will make more people buy Y fares. These bonuses have stimulated a handful of sales that you would have had no hope of getting otherwise, and they have filled seats that would have forever gone empty. And you capacity control the awards anyway, so what are you worried about? Maybe I should find that book on Customer Experience Management, and send it to Ben, Mike, and whomever else so they know "wowing" the customer is what will win them over.