Originally Posted by Frequent Freak

I suspect a HIGHER percentage of elites will be Gold next year for a couple reasons:

1. Lots of Plats and above who don't quit the airline completely are likely to still fly/spend enough to make Gold, and

2. The number of 1MMs will stay the same or slightly increase, and these people will grunt and bear it on UA to the same extent they do now.

IOW, people like you, and people like me. If the number of Silvers increases, it will be from people dropping from higher levels rather than hordes of new customers discovering the joys of flying UA. But I see this happening more at the Gold level.

So instead of Golds losing out to higher levels, Golds will be competing with other Golds for upgrades slightly more often. I'm not sure how much of a difference it will really make.

I think Plat will be the sweet spot for people who mostly fly domestically but not on transcons.