Originally Posted by
ijgordon
Ok, I've read most of the reactions except the last few pages. I do think people are over-reacting.
1) You don't have to book "blindly" for an instrument upgrade. AFAIK the "request upgrade" check box is still there and it will show you if a flight is available for confirmed upgrade or not. Instead of being shown the # of seats, you'll get a "yes" or "no" answer.
Agreed, this is somewhat mitigated.
2) Revenue bucket info is still available on KVS and ExpertFlyer. If you're really using this info ever day, $100/yr is worth it. Plus you get inventory and seat alerts. So you can still check availability for SDC (flight alerts are great for this too) and you can still try to gauge upgrade chances based on the CDJZ buckets (or whatever they are now). And FWIW, no other domestic airline shows (revenue) inventory buckets on their websites.
Don't get me even STARTED on this. I already pay $50 year to TripIt because it notifies me about United flight changes and cancellations, which United.com does NOT. I do NOT get notifications from United.com when my upgrades clear! I have to go and manually check my itineraries to see if it cleared - this is both for GPU and CPU. The ONLY reason I subscribed to ExpertFlyer is to fill in the GAP that United.com did not do. So now, the most valuable gap - upgrade inventory availability - is GONE - and I need to subscribe to something just to see revenue bucket availability? That's RIDICULOUS.
So I challenge someone to spell out how this will *really* impact the information they are able to get. Perhaps it makes it a little more expensive or time consuming, but to claim it as the end of the world is just going too far IMHO.
And yes, I get how this impacts your views of UA management and what they think of their frequent fliers, but let's try to focus on this specific issue.
Specific issue that Untied is making the lives of its most frequent flyers HARDER. We can't gauge fare bucket availability. We can't easily check upgrades without jumping through hoops. The same tasks that were possible before are either more expensive now(have to subscribe to another service) or take more time to complete on united.com
That is the big issue. United is NOT trying to make our travel experience better. It' making it worse.