Y'know, I may have the fastest trigger among moderators, but it hadn't occurred to me that the post might have been off-topic for MilesBuzz.

I even posted early in the thread.

For what it's worth, my sense of the promotion is that United made an attempt at rewarding business travel loyalty. And by making the award contingent on multiple bookings, better secure additional trips and thus future loyalty.

And then the other airlines saw that they needed a competitive response.

Now, maybe another carrier had a similar program on the shelf and ready to go already -- they use the same consultants, right? and recycle the same executives too, no? So it's not unreasonable to think that others had the idea as well.

But when United launched it, others needed to follow because they saw it as a real threat and as a really good idea.

So the crux of the offer is about rewarding and incentivizing loyalty with award travel -- which, at it's core, seems to me the topic of the MilesBuzz board.

And it was the very latest breaking program activity -- so quite "Buzzworthy" as well.

At least that's how I saw it initially.

I may be wrong about all of the above, but I also think that the above is at least plausible.

Hope that the above is a little bit useful, from the perspective of one of the MilesBuzz moderators.

Best,
Gary
aka gleff
MilesBuzz and Delta moderator

p.s. Thanks, Randy, for bringing the discussion here. We're all better off having the meta-discussions off-line instead of distracting from an original thread.