That's what UA says. I sat next to someone the other day who paid $160 to move to E+ for her entire transcon RT. That's just about the pre-tax cost of a deep-discount ticket!

And I think CO's eyes are starting to open on some of these counter-intuitive items. They're making good revenue on the ELR seats, yet they have very little inventory to sell. Imagine all those Elite-heavy flights where they have no inventory to sell. If they had E+, they'd be able to sell a chunk of that.

The fuzzy part is how much of it do you attribute to Elite members flying/returning to the carrier? In other words, how many people left CO because of piss-poor upgrade rates and crappy Y seats who may not have? And how many OAL Elites would have jumped on the CO bandwagon had CO had it?

I think it's an extremely fierce loyalty generator on UA since the value proposition is so huge. For the most part, you will never get a crappy seat when you fly us. That's huge for a lot of people.

As J.Edward points out, the combined carrier won't be able to use the same philosophies that worked for a captive IAH/EWR/CLE marketplace. ORD and LAX customers, for example, can hop on over to AA if UA pisses them off.

If AA relaxes their chAAllenge requirements, they could stand to be a big winner out of this, if CO tries to pull anything.