Originally Posted by
diver858
Not very sympathetic here. AAL moved quickly to harmonize / devalue award travel, implement without any advanced notice. Elite upgrades are a perk for their most loyal customers, one would expect some extra effort to maintain, increase loyalty.
Some changes are easier than others to implement. It's easy to change how much an award ticket costs - it's a static value. Instead of 50000, change it to 75000, or whatever.
Upgrades are more difficult. You have two disparate upgrade systems (only overlap is at CP/EXP). On one hand, you have a sticker and the other is unlimited comps, similar to CP/EXP. Just allowing upgrades across the board with each airlines' standard way leaves no upside for US flyers and will piss them off if they fly AA metal. AA flyers get free upgrades on US metal and screws US elites by creating much more competition for those upgrades - again pissing off US elites. The only way to harmonize that is to decide which upgrade scheme will be used, and make the programming changes accordingly.
However, the IT infrastructure is also problematic. We all know SHARES is getting dropped in favor of Sabre, so there's no point in making changes to a system that isn't long for this world. We don't know when the change will come, but for the time it would take to code and test the upgrade scheme on SHARES, it would probably be close to decommissioning anyway. The only simple change to SHARES would be to either take the AA number and reorder the upgrade queue to something like US CP > AA EXP > US PP > US GP > AA Plat > US SP > AA Gold - similar to UA's queuing when it merged with CO (giving the "home metal" advantage to its FFs). The other option is to give everyone a DM number and equivalent status. However, either option again screws US elites and will piss them off.
On the AA/Sabre side, the upgrade scheme decision would also have to be implemented. The advantage here is that whatever changes are made here will be permanent, so it's worth the cost to code the changes. I think it's pretty likely that EXP unlimited upgrades will remain, and AA EXP would take priority over US CP. So then, the decision needs to be made which upgrade system will be used for everyone else.
The first problem here is we don't know how many tiers are going to be in the new FFP. DM will likely disappear, so it doesn't make sense to put that status and processing in only to have to rip it out when it dies, so the logical thing would be to map US status to equivalent AA status - whatever that is for the new FFP. Once both of those are decided (if they're not already), Sabre can be reprogrammed, tested, and be ready for final integration.
The problem here is in the lower tiers no one's going to be happy, except maybe higher level AA Plats and US PP's. AA folks may not get an many upgrades, but can often get them when they want them under the sticker system. US folks know they might not always get them, but have a decent shot a lot of times. Most likely, both AA and US elites will experience lower upgrade percentages. US folks will probably be further incensed that they actually have to buy stickers too.
So what does this all mean? I'm thinking that EXP and CP will get upgrades on the other's metal, while upgrades for everyone else will wait until the final FFP is decided upon and both airlines are running on Sabre. I don't really see any other way to do it when it comes to costs, time, and complexity involved. It's not something that can be rushed, as any rush job would likely end very badly.