Originally Posted by
scubadu
Great post and I largely agree with everything you spelled out but I'll state what I think your saying (and what I fully believe) a bit more succinctly, which is that if everyone is "special" nobody is special.
I'm finding this game increasingly less interesting. I was never really driven by churning or miles accumulation, but rather maximizing our experience. For example, I used to love lounges to escape the terminal, they were a refuge. Access to lounges in the US was somewhat controlled by requiring either a membership (which most were unwilling to pay for) or status, which as you mentioned was less common than today. However, we are now in a world of highly, highly subsidized credit cards (via "travel credits") that have a low effective annual fee and provide large masses of people cheap lounge access. Hence we see countless threads on lounge crowding, etc. The experience has been utterly ruined and I've on occasion had to leave a crowed US airport lounge for the "quiet refuge" of the terminal!
One can extrapolate this example across the other vectors of the travel experience (airline status, hotel status, etc.) I don't mean to come off as "elitist" but there is a premium experience I'm willing to pay for, but it's increasingly difficult to even find it available, because to your point information arbitrage has evaporated. Anything remotely valuable is immediately blasted out via Boarding Area blogger and through all their various social media "channels" (FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) then the entire herd immediately shifts and devours the carcass within hours.
Wish I could generate a more positive outlook, but right now, not able to do so.
Regards
I am glad that I'm not the only one.
I recently upgraded my Hilton Amex from the silver status no-fee to the gold status $95/annum. Why turn down an upgrade + free breakfast elite status that would otherwise require 20 stays (20 Hamptons is a solid $2000-2300 minimum spend) + 10 free priority pass lounge visits per year all for $95? That's literally the best miles/points/program arbitrage opportunity I have seen in a while now. $95<$2,300.
The down side is the crowding, particularly in North America, of formerly more exclusive elite spaces. Hilton "exec" lounges are a joke - a single room or junior suite converted into the breakfast room for all diamonds (sometimes golds too) + whomever was naive enough to pay an extra $30-50/nt for exec lounge benefits - a croissant, chopped melon, and powder-egg breakfast in the morning and cookies in the evening ($6 for a domestic bottle beer). The relaxing ambiance is on par with the NY Penn Station McDonalds.