Originally Posted by
Kacee
This is total myth. I'm sure AS will be delighted to pick up pax who spend $18k per year flying 75,000 miles BIS on less than 54 segments.
When PQD were introduced, we talked about "low spend" flyers being those below 8 cents per mile or so, and an18 cpm BIS flyer was "an HVF" who would clear the original $10k PQD threshold with ease.
Now those who seek to justify UA's new rules are calling 25 cpm (BIS) tickets "very cheap."
Before last weekend's mileage run, I was sitting at 6.9 cpm on the year. None of this total up until that point was mileage running, it was all completely legit travel: trips to China and Hawaii on UA metal, and a trip to Chile on CM metal to watch the total eclipse (I would have paid about a 25-30% premium for UA metal to SCL, but the actual premium UA was charging over CM was something like 75%, so as a result, I didn't fly UA metal on that trip). This is just based on what tickets happened to be available when I wanted to book, tracking prices via Google Flights for a while, and making purchases about 21-100 days before departure.
Mapping the old system for Premier Gold (50000 PQM) onto the new system (10000 PQP), we can calculate that UA wants at least 20 cpm if you are going to fly 50k miles. That's absolutely insane. You're talking about $2k R/T tickets from the US West Coast to Asia at that point. Alternately, you're talking about flying 83333 miles instead of 50000 at the old requirement of 12 cpm (50000 PQM + 6000 PQD). I mean, I like traveling, but I'm not going to just literally throw money away like that. A few years ago, I purchased a personal ticket to go to Asia about 3-7 days prior to departure, and even that fairly last minute ticket was only around 13-15 cpm. You literally have to TRY to throw away money to hit a 20 cpm target if you're flying Y; if you always fly J or F, you'll hit that target easily, but you don't care about status if you do that.