Throwing this out to my FT friends. I've been 1K for about a decade now. My business travel ended years ago, and my "natural" personal travel is 65-70K BIS/year, at a cost of about $6-7k. For a few years I did MRs to reach 100K, and the last couple of years I've paid maybe $3K/yr on Accelerators to maintain 1K status. Looking at the new PQD requirements, I'm already paying what UA wants, but they won't count the Accelerators, so I would need to go back to MRs (or pay more for existing flights) to keep my 1K. I may become one of those people that UA is going to lose, and in my case, they will lose pure revenue--they were getting my Accelerator $$ with no corresponding costs.
My UA CC will have at least $25K in charges, so reaching Platinum is no big deal. I might decide to keep going for 1K, but I have to think seriously about what I'm getting for that extra $3-4K. Here's the list I took from .bomb of 1K vs. Platinum bennies:
- CPU upgrade 24 hours earlier
- Instant M-class upgrades
- 6 GPUs
- 2 more RPUs
- 25% more RDMs (200% vs. 175%)
- Dedicated 1K customer service line
- $60/yr reimbursement for Chase credit card fees
I don't use half of these, and I use my GPUs as RPUs most of the time, so I came up with a "value to me" of about $2500/yr for the 1K stretch, which means it's not worth it to me to push for 1K.
Are there any other 1K-exclusive benefits that I'm forgetting?