Originally Posted by
gruss
The March 1 changes include a significant price increase. I'm assuming this is all to cut down on people buying up from dirt to Chairman in advance of the FFP integration.
Something tells me there may be a lot of 85-90k fliers like myself buying up in the next couple weeks.
I bought up last week... just to be sure.... and this had not been posted yet. Glad I did. I was 17K miles short of CP which I probably could have met... except I flew/had several long award flights last year.
Originally Posted by
dcpatti
I'd reckon that it weeds out a lot of people and that the number of people who actually will take the time to do some mileage running combined with the people who just pay the higher cost would be a net decrease compared to if they left the price lower. Given the spend requirements at UA and DL (which I am pretty sure will be making their way to AA in 2016), I think the overall aim is fewer elites who spend more money instead of more elites who spend less.
In other words... they're thinning the herd, and my bet is that 5-10 years from now it's going to be very difficult to have a meaningful level of status without being a very profitable customer.
You may be right. But the people all of these changes are going to hurt are going to be the non-business flyers. I think I do pretty well knocking out almost 80K miles of leisure travel each year... and viewed the ability to buy up that last little bit as a nice little perk for my loyalty to US... often choosing to fly US out of loyalty even though fares with other airlines were much lower.
That being said, I think the increase is way over the top.... agreeing with the analysis that it doesn't make too much sense to offer 25K at 10 cpm and then have 2000K cost such a ridiculous amount.
Honestly, I don't see the AA people keeping those 8 SWU's. If our program has got to take a 'hit' then I think there are going to be some adjustments to the perks of the other program as well.
Originally Posted by
MikeLaw
Raises hand
Smart move.