Originally Posted by
iahphx
I guessed 2000 tickets yesterday, but that might be conservative since most folks undoubtedly booked multiple pax/itineraries.
I still think each ticket is "worth" about $5000 to UA in lost revenue (that might be a tad high, though -- without discounts, I think you can buy an EWR-HKG BF ticket for about $6800). So my ballpark bet was that this would be a $10 million mistake if honored.
And that, my friends, is the problem here. $10 million would actually be "material" to UAL's earnings (although less so if the cost were spread out over the next 12 months).
That would also mean any regular award booked is a loss of revenue in tune of that amount. And it's certainly ain't since people wouldn't otherwise spend the money on a full fare ticket and UA itself sells the miles for around 2 cents/each - so about 2,5k lost revenue for a 120k mile ticket at best, and probably less then half that since the capacity control is way tigher with awards and seeing no revenue at all when the seat go empty has to be factored in too.
I don't know how standard awards play into this, but just with regular awards people would get bottlenecked pretty quick on the popular routes helping to gauge actual interest.