PG. Again like you I am officially in the dark. But my guess is it would take as much time for a United team, or Starwood team etc to do a chat session on any given site that had say 100 signed up persons, (even to 100 carefully moderated persons of course) as it would to do live chat on a site that had say 20,000 registered persons. And if the exact same 100 could be reached via the site that had the 20,000 users anyway ....

As these are busy, senior, highly paid staffers, standing around talking to coach check-in lines at most airports would generate more revenue and response in far less time I guess, than the former option. But as always, I could be wrong with the math.

And speaking of math, the most attendees ever at a FT chat was the United one a month back with 300-400 different at most, from a user base of say for arguments sake 20,000. So say 2 people per 100 users bothered to turn up.

So if the same ratio occured on a website with 100 users, the United guys would have been having a one on one chat. Going out for a sit-down pizza makes more sense when you get that small really? Robert Sahadevan (President of Mileage Plus) and Jim Davidovich (Manager of Airline Partnerships) might go for that idea - personal marketing might just be the way to stay No #1? As China and India are 2 of UA's current flight markets, and each have a billion+ folks in each, that is quite a few Pizzas I guess.

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~ Glen ~



[This message has been edited by ozstamps (edited 05-02-2001).]