I suspect there is a certain amount of FT Schadenfreude going on here with people hoping UA will revisit their recent changes to MP. I would just point out that
- It's way too soon to see any impact from the potential status changes on flyer behavior. Although I will grant that UA knows exactly where people are WRT qualifying today and has best case/worst case forecasts going forward.
- You could make the argument that moving to dynamic pricing of reward seats is working exactly the way UA wanted it to. When demand was high, they priced the seats with very high redemption levels and restricted availability. International demand drops like now, and I'm having no problem finding what used to be seen as saver level seats. Since they can't make schedule changes overnight, it gives them a much finer inventory management tool.