Originally Posted by
pbarnette
And this differs from the incentive to stop booking with CO after 75k, how? In what way is this "botched"? How is there not now more incentive to book post-75k than there was last year? Not saying that this program will drive a lot of incremental revenue, but claims that it increases the incentive to book away from DL vs last year's program (or most of the competition) completely fails the sniff test.
Well, it was implemented fairly poorly.
Many at the Plat level see only a marginal benefit to Diamond, so there's not much incentive to get there. There is a club membership, but that has no value to a ST E+ flying internationally (you get free club access anyway). Further, many are already club members, and the Diamond level doesn't extend one's membership, rather it overlaps it. So if someone has an existing, 3-year or Lifetime membership, the club membership does no good.
The other big "incentive" is the PMUs, which as has been pointed out are highly restrictive. So if one is not able to use them, again, no value here.
So, what happens then is a Platinum who would fly say 130K miles on DL and would realize no benefits to Diamond, would actually be better served by crediting 124K to DL and either not flying or crediting the additional 6K elsewhere. This would allow him to start off the next year with 49K rollover. Had he credited all to DL, then he'd be at Diamond with 5K rollover, a loss of 44K rollover, which is significant, based on the assumption that the Diamond buys him nothing.
In the end, while the rollover EQM encourages people to fly over 75K, the weakness of the Diamond tier may discourage some from flying or crediting if they are approaching the 125K tier.
CO, OTOH, with no such tier or rollover, simply has no incentive, but also no dis-incentive. So if someone wants to fly 130K or even 200K on CO, no problem.