Good post. I only have quarrel with this statement. Maybe in reservations, it is true, but at an airport, the only supervisors who even know how any of the reward programs work, what the instruments are...are ones that used to be hourly labor units.

While many companies train supervisors in the roles of the employees, UA, at least in airport operations does not do such a thing. Their training, it matters like this comes from observing the agents. Some are curious and ask us, to explain to them what the issues are after the fact, many do not.

I rarely want to discount the value of the input from the people in the field, but this is an area where the phone contacts in reservations would provide a far better feedback than the airport ops people. Res deals with this far more than we do, as instruments of upgrade are mostly set up far in advance, while the field spends most of their time operating flights, with the reservation work being almost trivial in comparison to our operational duties. The opposite is true of call center reps.