Originally Posted by
jbsay
I salute your project and wish it the best, but it's incorrect to state that there's no bias on equipment, size of upgrade lists, etc. This is so because the very FTers who are most likely to contribute to diditclear are, for the most part, also more likely than most UA elites to book flights with the highest expected upgrade probabilities. In other words, however much a "typical" 1K weighs a plane's F/Y ratio when booking flights, diditclear contributors almost certainly weigh the F/Y ratio to a far greater extent. On the other hand, FTers who are happy with their CPU % may well skip over threads that discuss CPU statistics, while FTers who are dissatisfied with their CPU % are more likely to keep tabs on efforts to collect data about CPUs. Given the many confounding, conflicting variables at issue, it's difficult to ascertain with reasonable certainty any meaningful trends about CPU probabilities from diditclear.
I actually think that basic things that many of us do (F/y ratio; checking F seat map, checking F=#) are probably beyond the vast majority of 1Ks, let alone lower level elites. In my firm, of those with 1K or GS status (about 10 of us) I am the only one who books my own travel, everyone else has their AA do it. I can assure you the AAs are not checking the way I am.
IMHE when I have talked to 1ks, their understanding usually does not go past the level of "its hard to upgrade Monday am, Friday afternoon, and Sunday night" or "SFO/EWR suck for upgrades" or "my rate of upgrades is down.
If you are obsessive about, and flexible on when you travel (unlike me, I usually need to travel at a set time and day, only flexibility I have is choosing another airline or routing) I would bet that you can push your upgrade basis by 30 or 40 points or more off the base line. On the other hand, I'm sure that were I not doing what I can my upgrade rate would be 10% lower, in that I would take the flight routing that works best, and not get upgraded as a result.
So I expect the overall upgrade rate on diditclear to be significantly higher than the usual average because anyone compulsive enough to post their upgrades/missed on a website are probably doing all they can to get upgrades.
The posts on this thread that ring true to me are those 1ks who say "my rate is X" and either "I fly a mixture of x/x/x fares and have little flexibility with lots of Monday/Friday flights" or "I fly a mixture of X/X/X fares and have lots of flexibility, I move my travel days to get upgrades and avoid Monday/Friday, lots of my travel is Saturday."
Again, I appreciate the work going into DidItClear, I will continue to post my upgrades there, I find the information very interesting, but I don't think that it can reasonably be claimed to be representative of the "typical" experience it is instead reflective of the experience of the FT hard core who would post/track their upgrades.
