Interesting discussion here about this topic:
http://boardingarea.com/viewfromthew...-explanations/
Comment 15 by "what the" makes some good points.
on this very page there are 5(!) advertisements for credit card offers to get you a ton of miles without doing any flying at all. that’s all the evidence you need that this blog contributes to mile inflation and the subsequent devaluation. you can’t have it both ways Gary – you want to be able to get people more miles while also arguing that airlines should not devalue their miles in response to said inflation. you are contributing to the problem, not the solution.
Multiple subsequent posts make convincing arguments too.
I think this commenter brings up what may really be the over-arching issue creeping up (though I don't know that I agree the UA hard product shortfalls alone are driving this latest UA decision). The mileage earning issue is just one aspect of it. The alliances are weakening.
Even though for someone like me who redeems for international Y mostly, and not J/F, this deval doesn't affect me much directly... I could see a time where UA invokes a differential rate approach to Y partner awards, too.
Confucius Jackson said,
I’d argue that the alliance concept is slowly showing cracks around the structural differences between the partner markets. Credit card spend (manufactured or not) and signup bonuses are not exclusively an American phenomenon, but definitely more pronounced here. And airlines like the alliance when it brings money in, but not when it sends money out.
Look at what Delta is doing with cutting MQM-earning on some of its partner airlines. Now look at this UA move, along with how they treat *G differently in terms of perks vs. their own 50k fliers.
UA doesn’t want to pay to upgrade their F hard product to be the equal of LH or SQ. They want people flying UA to the foreign gateway, and the alliance partner beyond that. It’s not a real “alliance” but now they can’t undo things and not allow redemptions to the foreign gateway on the alliance partners.
Instead, they do ham-handed actions like cutting capacity themselves (Starnet, anybody?) and now setting differential rates.
At the end of their day, this is UA admitting that their J/F product isn’t as good as their alliance partners.