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While there has been many recommendations, suggestions, and speculations on what UA would or could do, most of them are from the point of view on how the airline can extract revenue. However, I think it is equally important to recognize that the airline needs to best understand their customer base first above all else.

As it's been pointed out, high revenue flyers are great but cannot solely sustain their business. Low fare frequent business flyers make an equally important contribution. Designing a FF program that pisses off too many of those who actually sit on the plane is a sure way to lose revenue.

UA has enough statistics to make a decision... whether they choose to heed that or make a run for high revenue flyers only is entirely management's call. They've shown tremendous amount of poor judgement in how to implement their IT system (SHARES, I'm looking at you), so it's anyone's guess if they will do something to screw their FF program up.