Originally Posted by
golfer20
I really can't image more than 5% of AA flyers actively searching for ways to earn LPs. If you're really looking, earning lots of LPs isn't terribly difficult, but you need to know where to earn them.
I really have to agree with this. The number of people getting to, say, 125,000 miles and earning PP because they've booked dozens of RM bookings is probably pretty low. I think you'll see the average person who bothers to pay attention get some LP's off of these various pathways, but the requirements are so much higher for status levels that these opportunities will likely be offsetting how close one gets to status via flying.
The RM interface is still clunky, from room selection to filterable search results, so there are plenty of families, business folks, etc. that will simply want to use a more convenient interface such as Marriott or booking.com (even the booking.com site, which powers AA hotels, is better because you have an account where you can log in to see your bookings, more rooms are refundable, etc.). In addition, you have to account for the fact that many people actually try for status with hotels, rental cars, etc. so there is an opportunity cost to putting all of your eggs in the AA LP basket.
To me, the biggest sacrifice - other than interface - is choice. I'm in Mexico now, and there are plenty of other options in terms of Airbnb, booking.com, etc. that offer me a better selection of location and fine-tuning what I'm looking for in a particular price range. With RM and AA Hotels, I can still find stuff, but I would likely have ended up booking something different. This is entirely the point - AA (and the hotel) is buying my business my offering me LP's. I stay with their preferred vendor and they throw me some credit toward status.
Isn't this what loyalty is all about? I'm completely fine with this - I'm still getting a good hotel for roughly what I would have paid for it, but you're swaying my decision to take my business to you because you're giving me something in return that's valuable to me.
All of this said, if the base miles on RM (stay and get 3,000 miles) don't actually count, and they decide to do a spend equivalent, that would be massively deceptive cause me to significantly think my loyalty. I've already got several RM and AA hotels booking given the amount of travel I have going on right now, all of which were chosen entirely because to the LP construct.