Originally Posted by
dilanesp
Yep.
Also, it is worth remembering that international long haul upgrades are extremely valuable. People pay a lot of money for them, and the pricing of Standard Awards reflects that.
So I suspect that the goal of many carriers is to give out only the minimum number of Ssver or instrument upgrades necessary to maintain FF goodwill, and to sell the rest either as Standard Awards or for cash.
Different airlines may have different waya of getting to that endpoint. But that is the endpoint.
While I take your point, from a business perspective, it's hard to see the current arrangement satisfying that "minimum number ... necessary to maintain FF goodwill". Which will someday, again, be important (even if it isn't today) when the market starts tightening up again, as it inevitably will.
Look at it this way... A round-trip to Asia for two people, in J. Typical vacation fodder, which your average traveling couple might go on once every few years. To redeem that at current Standard levels, that is 700,000 points.
UA changed the earning model such that there's not many easy ways to "churn" that kind of balance. If you're a general member, you'd have to spend
$140,000 USD on United to earn enough RDMs for that award. Even 1Ks would have to spend $63,600 USD, or more than 4x the annual 1K spend threshold.
At the same time, it's not uncommon to find J tickets for somewhere in the $3000 neighborhood these days, if you're flexible, which would also be the typical flexibility that someone going on vacation would accommodate. So, that pricing still offers the "extremely valuable" J ticket at considerably less than $0.01 per point, on redemption.
Ironically, while flying partner metal on a partner ticket would not do anything to earn you status, a current 1K buying that $3k ticket on NH, for say SEA-NRT-SIN would net about 48,400 MP points (3x distance, inc'l class of service and elite bonuses), while buying it on 016 stock would only net 33,000. So the earnings side of the equation is out of whack as well. Literally everything about the current structure is tilted, seemingly, to say "don't fly United if you're not on a deeply-discounted corporate contract", aside from any psychological factors that may be at play.
I'm not discounting UA's desire to make money. Make hay while the sun is shining, and if they can get away with the current premium, great! But, if nothing else, it seems somewhat short-sighted in light of the fact that corporate contracts have a tendency to evaporate overnight when the market starts to dive. Driving your un-managed traffic away on both the earning and redeeming side of the equation seems like poor planning, sooner or later... Flyertalkers may be a non-standard sampling of the market, but in this case, if the "experts" can't figure out a way to make the system work, which way are the common novices going to vote??