Originally Posted by
Kacee
Ultimately how UA handles upgrade inventory is up to management. But there is no question that the decline in upgrade availability has caused me to shift a substantial quantity of flying to other carriers over the past two years. If I have to pay for J/F, I'm only going to buy UA when it offers a competitive combination of price, product, and schedule, and that is often not the case.
That is really it. I fly a lot internationally, and using even one GPU will often make the UA flight the cheapest business class, and I will buy it. Otherwise, I am happy to buy UA if it is cheapest business class, or another carrier if they are the cheapest. I'm not loyal to the brand (maybe if every flight had been like the original Polaris advertisements, I'd have become more loyal) or to 1K status, and I would already have bought more long-haul UA in 2019 if the GPUs had been more usable. For 2019, PZ availability really seems to have shrunk. I suspect a lot of people who fly at the 1K level think that way. We are not going to fly UA just out of loyalty. But we fly a lot.