Originally Posted by
Darlox
I think this might miss the whole point of AA's move. I strongly doubt they launched this as a strategic lure for HVFs. This is marketing. You create a perceived low-barrier to get something nice in return. You build a habit. "Well gee... I made 25k, but now my Boss wants me to fly to Sao Paulo, and if I go on vacation with my wife in October, I'll hit 40k and get this bonus!"
nail. head.
i think what's pretty clever here is that the mid-tier bonuses either don't really seem to impact the road warriors, or it's just a little more of what you'd get at the next tier you're reaching for anyway. 75K gets you one SWU? if i was reaching for EXP anyway it's just a nice addition to my six, or if i'm a 50K-100K flyer, a free international upgrade is just something that's nice to have. a couple AC passes or 500 mile stickers at 40K? well if i hit 50K i will get a bunch anyway, so it's a nice addition. and it probably won't affect the gold flyers to begin with since they probably don't fly enough to notice anyway.
but i think here's the other bit, and this goes to the overall discussion happening in multiple threads on this forum.
it's about branding.
we can argue day in day out about the merits of each individual benefit, whether GPU's are more or less useful than AA SWU's, CPU's vs the 500 mile stickers and their free upgrade system, and so on and so forth. but i think overall (and especially a noticeable uptick as of the last year or two) they're successfully taking a variety of small things and creating this image (successful or not) that they're trying and that they care. their twitter people responding quickly to aid in irrops. the fact that horton even made an apology video in addition to the frequent FB/twitter updates was a really smart PR move in my mind. they're also holding steady with aadvantage and are making incremental improvements to it, such as this one here.
again it's not really about what program is more valuable, whose perks are more useful, or any of that. AA is trying to create a brand image of the "new american" and my opinion is that the image that they have created is a much better one than UA has made with the "new united."
we get threads in the UA forum like this on occasion where AA does something and there's a lot of "wow, i wish UA did that." i go on the AA forum on occasion and definitely see a lot less of the reverse. it looks like american's at least trying. it looks like united is not. then again i'm in sales (and sometimes marketing) so i believe image and perception are very powerful things.