So I know the grass is not always greener on the other side, and every airline has it's issues, but I am an AA loyalist based out of ORD thinking about jumping on the United bandwagon. For starters, the status free match makes it really easy to start off with United silver. I typically have enough personal travel to hit the bottom two rungs of any airline loyalty program, and higher if I have business travel - but that looks out of reach for a while. I only picked AA over United originally because I had the AA credit card since college and honestly the free drinks in Y MCE which are gone and probably will never come back. I have like four AMEX cards with Airline Incidental re-imbursement - so I could just buy the drinks in UA Y using those credits. The last straw was seeing article after article about how UA cares about their domestic hard product unlike AA who just keeps taking out IFE.
So my question is - are there any former AA loyalists, and if so what are the differences you notice - bonus points for anyone out of ORD. Seems like I need to request the match by 9/3.