ibuyyoufly

I don't doubt what you said. My only point by bringing up the fortress hub comment is, they have not shown me a single thing about being able to understand, target and execute on a strategy for those of us flying out of Open/Competitive hubs. What motivates me to fly UA out of DEN is something entirely different than someone out of IAH.

Also, from a true Marketing perspective in a fortress hub environment, the Marketing staff can make some fairly large mistakes, be off target, use wrong data, error in message delivery, etc, and not "hurt" the business. These consumers won't be going any where. And, the programs to this consumer don't have to offer much due to this non-competitive environment.

Whereas for me, UA has to pull out all the stops, spend money, make as good of offers as all the others (DL, AA, WN, F9) who are drowning me with offers to compete for my dollars. This is the area I personally feel the new UA fails and for several reasons.

First, they don't want to spend the money to be competitive, (Examples- 1)Smi/J wanting to run from IAH because WN is going International out of Hobby. 2)Not caring about not being the #1 airline when the US/AA merger is announced.). I personally don't feel Smi/J is a fighter. In fact, I think he is weak and fearful of competition. He's not up for a challenge and not a person I would want at the helm of my company. I also think Marketing Spend are two words Smi/J detests. I've not met too many Economic/Finance MBA's/Majors that understand or are comfortable with those Expense Lines.

Secondly, I don't think they have the bandwidth, experience or prowess to Advertise/Market/build programs, out to the Open/Competitive hub consumers. They haven't had to do it in the past and I just don't think they have it in them.

And last, they do a terrible job of communicating out to their customer base. Maybe it's just me because I have the email switch turned off on my profile, but to me it's been like radio silence on a submarine over the last 18 months. They are certainly coming in last place relative to all the impressions I get from the other airline company's I listed above. So I don't know if this is intentional or whether they don't have this skill-set, but either way, the UA Brand impressions have certainly been absent. That is other than the "You're In" ads on this site, but I look at all those as Chase ads anyway.

For the record, I did not get this program announcement, which is fine since I am a Kayaker now. And for the record, I am a Plat for this year, after having been Gold forever, but only have 7 segments year to-date on UA. I have no plans to go out of my way to book UA and am sure I will be lucky to be Silver for 2014. Maybe they know that which is why I won't get targeted.

I would be curious to know, for those of you who did get targeted, what hub or station you fly out of. That info could be very telling.