GUCs are a bigger deal for some than others. For some, they’re a nice indulgence but don’t really save money because they wouldn’t pay for D1. For me, we pay for D1 so when we “strategically” choose to use our GUCs they really do save us a large sum.

For instance, I’m posting this from our hotel room in SYD. We would’ve paid ~$7000/pp (x2) for the flight from HSV>SYD in D1. I intentionally selected flights that appeared to have ample availability in D1, booking Y for ~$1800/pp. I called to apply the GUCs, and the outbound legs (except for the ATL>LAX leg, where some weird stuff happened) cleared quickly. The return legs look pretty good, so I’m reasonably optimistic.

That’s a very real cost savings for us of $10,000 that we can directly attribute to the GUC benefit that accompanies DM status.

We’re flying the miles and spending the money, so we’re happy to get *something* tangible out of the deal. Between my wife and myself we’ll spend ~$50-60K and accrue >300K MQMs, plus AMEX boosts.

It’s not D360 territory (bummer) but, properly used, GUCs have literally kept $10K in my bank account that wouldn’t otherwise be there.

That’s real value.