Originally Posted by
jsloan
Fair enough, although I'd quibble with the last bit. If you're in a hub -- I'm guessing from the ability to fly nonstop to most cities -- I don't remember hearing about GS qualifying at the $24K level. Still, $24K is a lot of spending, no doubt.
Ah! That's what I failed to consider, and now it makes much more sense. I apologize. I can see how 1K looked to be unattainable / unworthy of being attained in November and easy to make now.
I suspect that you will find life as a ExPlat or Diamond in a UA hub is better than life as a 1K -- but you're connecting more. If you were in ATL, you might find that being a 1K was much better.
AUS-based, where only WN has a significant nonstop network, I choose UA because I can get upgrade certificates that I can clear in advance (I'm flexible) and they publish the inventory bucket so that I don't have to call and waste an agent's time to find them. I also get a significant CPU percentage -- last year it was over 70%; this year I'm at about 50% so far. I'm guessing that those may not have applied for you, though. I also have no intention of spending $18K to get status -- that was actually the #1 reason I was contemplating leaving UA before. 15K PQD on last year's UA was more expensive than 15K MQD on DL, because there was no way to get extra credit by booking the right partner flights.
It wasnt unattainable so much as 1k is not worth it.
UA has the largest number of GPU's available (3 vs 2) when being a 1k. But.... they are more heavily restricted. They have to be used by the expire date - DL allows them to just be ticketed by the expire date. These are examples of course but the issue is that 1k is not the preeminent status to have yet UA charges like it is better than the other two top earning status.
24k is too much to spend for what is provided. The messaging here is that 1k is worth 24k of spend at the current benefit level. The benefits available at 12k are now worth double the spend? NFW........
I can't find a reason to use UA when I could get DL and AA top tier for 6k more spend. That gives one 4 roundtrip upgrades on different airlines - much better IMHO. It also allows me to choose between two carriers rather than being carrier dependent. And lets not forget the partner network of any two of the airlines means that the possibilities for finding deals are almost endless. Add in the fact that UA gives away GS to too many people (IMHO) and 1k beomes the equivalent of Plartinum/Platinum Pro on the other legacy carriers. UA should have increased the benefits and raised the requirements.