Originally Posted by
arcticflier
Good details.
Isn’t your argument really with the Card that offered you PP with a promise it would be accepted at numerous Clubs rather than the individual airlines who refused to recognize it?
Obviously AS would welcome the loyalty of a frequent traveler like yourself. I find AS vastly superior to UA; however, I hold no privilege on UA so I don’t receive special treatment as you would.
I'm not going to go so far as to say you're
wrong to suggest that PP/Chase/Amex are more to blame than Alaska in terms of what a crapshoot it is in terms of getting into Alaska Lounges with PP given that the Alaska Lounges are the special problem children as far as PP lounges go. PP should probably be more willing to pull the trigger on smacking (smacking = an ultimatum on stop jerking our members around or just fully pull out of our program) Alaska for how it's behaving in regard to PP access...but Alaska is the one who's trying to have it both ways on listing itself as being a PP lounge while playing all of these stupid games about allowing access; no other PP lounge is as fickle about access as Alaska is with its lounges.
If Alaska doesn't want to let in PP members, then it should just fully withdraw from PP. If Alaska's problem is with PP members clogging up the lounges because of tending to max out the family/guest allowances, then I would be fine with Alaska demanding a special dispensation on from PP om limiting PP access to member-only with 0 guest allowance no matter what kind of PP membership you have. Reliably getting in when traveling by myself would be far preferable to having to roll the dice on the no-PP sign being out every time I go to the airport.
But no matter how you slice it, it's just ridiculous all around that Alaska is allowed to get away with claiming to be a PP lounge while being so notorious for not actually letting anyone in under PP. Again, if they don't think letting in PP members is a good idea for them then that's fine, but they need to either .... or get off the pot on this issue.
Anywhooo...it was time for me to take stock on what AFs to avoid so I decided to go with PCing my CSR to a CF/U and canceling my Biz Plat (even before the higher AF was announced) and just trying a year of an AA Exec. I was going to apply for an AA card with a 70k/75k bonus anyhow so I figured trying a year of guaranteed lounge access while still getting those 70k AA miles was worth at least trying out if I could make the year-over-year AFs at worst be a wash.