Originally Posted by
LASUA1K
Basically you would get 4 e500's per 10K miles. If I remember correct. A flight from ORD-DTW, would take 1 e500. ORD-LAS was 3 e500's. Etc.. They still had the upgrade window, which always cleared for me as a 1K. You were able to pick when you wanted to sit in first. I didn't use them for the short runs, mostly, ord-las,lax,sfo,sea,pdx,hnl. You also got 2 Regionals every quarter. Total of 8 for 1k's. So, if you wanted to sit in first, it was almost a guarantee.
FYI, lot's of 1k's in the old days, had no clue what these were, and never used them. This made upgrading for everyone much easier. Silvers, Executives, 1K's had great success.
Sounds good in theory, but how did it work in practice? (I too am new here). Most of my miles are international, so if I earned 2000 miles in F for every 10000 miles I flew then I'd be able to do most of my domestic flying in F. So it sounds good to me, even if I prefer the *idea* of getting something for free which is what UDU feels like.
But surely everyone would save them up for trans-cons and nobody would want to burn them on short jaunts. As a 1P surely I'd still find myself in a situation where I couldn't clear into F for a SFO-EWR even if I was willing to fork over five e500s. I'd either wind up burning them on short jaunts like SFO-LAX where F doesn't matter, or I'd wind up with an ever-increasing stack of impossible-to-use upgrades.