Originally Posted by
mitchmu
My argument is that 1K is only worth having for GPUs that get you out of hell on long flights. These days, with TODs and HODs and X-UPs, there are plenty of cheap and easy ways to get into F. And, fee waivers are given to all tiers, so assuming one would naturally be at the 50K or 75K level, I'm not sure how much incremental value there is from the fee waivers compared with the cost of acquiring the status to get the waivers in the first place.
And, as for you, "4 figure" means anything from 1,000 to 9,999. That's a big range. I'm questioning some of these $3-4K numbers. If you told me you were at $8-9K, it would be easier to for me to comprehend.
you are forgetting about being to play with Award tkts, since I fly to a popular Intl destination the best seats in Saver usually open at the last min, so I grab what I can when I can and hope something better opens later and simply switch. A few months ago a few hrs before departing out of PHL what I really wanted opened up on LX out of JFK, Bingo made the switch and it cost $0 and drove to JFK instead of PHL My return I switched as well from XXX-ZRH-GVA-JFK to XXX-ZRH-JFK. Now I have 500k with US but w/o status with them I can only grab the exact routing I want unless I want to keep paying all sorts of fees
Thats besides getting to visit many places.
But I can even understand a MRer who turns right around. eg NY-ONT was $160 say you do 10 of them so you spent $1600 earned (the way I fly) 123000 RDMs and now fly to my reg destination in C , while $1600 may just cover an ElCheapo tkt in Y and earn 22k RDMs and are 62% of the way to 1K instead of 11% That C tkt is usually $4500+
Each person has their own reasons . Ideally COdbaUA would love it if we simply purchased Refundable tkts at top $$$, and is well aware what goes on, they need to walk a fine line where they dont turn off everyone who isnt a Full Fare person. BA did that when they started giving only 25% EQMs & RDMs to those on ElCheapos they switched back. Every Carrier needs both types of flyers.
Maybe CO should start giving out more GPUs and RPUs as a persons spend hits certain amounts. I do agree they should be giving more to those with the good spend, how to do that w/o turning off the others is the hard part