Originally Posted by
jsloan
The corollary to what I wrote is that if UA isn't the best airline for you in 2020, it wasn't the best airline for you in 2019 either. But what you wrote was that if UA hadn't made changes to MileagePlus, you would have given them all of this additional business, and I was trying to figure out which possible changes could have led to that decision, since the main one -- pure spend-based qualification -- doesn't seem like it would have affected you, given your spending patterns.
I suppose it did not exactly. I certainly could have gotten 1k again even at the 24k spend. After all the adjustments though i began to question how important the schedule really was for me. Sure, I liked flying to direct to most cities but little things started to get to me. Having a GS cut in at the last minute and take the upgrade for instance. Or the myriad delays I suffered. To be sure, this wasnt enough to be terminal on its own, but add in their zealous over estimating the worth of 1k and I began to wonder if there wasn't a better choice out there. Keep in mind that three years ago 24k would likely have netted a look at GS.
The irony here is I would have been 1k again this year had UA not come out with this nonsense. Its like the entire organization has a positive gift for doing something extremely tone deaf at exactly the wrong time. The message they sent to us in November 2019 was that fliers spending 15k a year were no longer worthy of being top tier elites. Then the market falls apart 3 months later when a large number of UA fliers are working on digesting that. Ironically I ended up going from a simple 1k to top tier on two airlines because my travel patterns changed.
All of this is noise though - UA is an inferior airline. The fact that they think 1k is the highest valued Elite status of all the other airlines is comical. I found 1k to be about 3/4 of what diamond has been. I have no experience with AA, but I suspect they treat their elites a bit better too.