Originally Posted by
scnzzz
Actually - and this is a bit of an epiphany to me at least - the loss of CPUs isn't what's hurting pmUS Plats. It's the merger in general and the influx of a large number of pmAA elites who will now clear at the same equivalent windows rather than just at OLCI, well after the windows for CP/Plat have opened.
Yes, that's exactly right. This is why I refer to the sticker vs. complimentary upgrades mainly as a question of philosophy. The real problem is that there is going to be more upgrade scarcity. There is no future in which non-CP US elites are going to get upgraded all the time for free, because even if the combined airline would have adopted US-style complimentary upgrades there would be sufficient demand for upgrades that they'd no longer reliably clear. How do I know this? There already exist routes where EXPs don't reliably clear complimentary upgrades, so surely lower tier elites are not going to manage to do so. If you come to the table with the assumption that you're not going to qualify for EXP but that you're going to get regularly upgraded for free, you're either flying particularly odd routes or just not being realistic about what the mix of fliers is going to look like in the future.
Or, put another way: I'd be really interested to hear from current US PLTs a year from now who request upgrades on every flight and hear just how much they had to spend on upgrades during the year. That will give us some sense of how big of a devaluation this actually was, since I suspect there will be a bunch of flights where they don't get upgraded even with less overall demand for upgrades.