IMHO America West has gone down hill significantly in the 3 years I've been flying them. In that time I've flown a little over 205,000 base miles. I couldn't use them for approximately 7 months this year and so I'll have a paltry 55K or so at the end of the year.

The service itself is fine for the price of the travel I guess but the upgrades are virtually non-existent. I've been flying USAirways quite a bit on the same route(PHL-PHX) as a Gold level and am almost 100% on upgrades. I can't be at more than 20% on America West and have seen a Gold person get upgraded before me while we were waiting to take off. I would not have known had she not told me that she was struggling to make Gold level again this year. Normally I don't complain about upgrades, the more revenue America West makes, the more it benefits me as a regular traveler of the airline but this really irked me. My conversations with CS reps were useless even after moving up 2 levels. As a software engineer I'm extremely disappointed in logic used for upgrades. It seems like too many random occurrences allow a Silver to get an upgrade over a Gold or Platinum. That's not right. I was discussing this with 3 other guys that are on my flights every week and we've all seen it. They're making a lot of heavy travelers very angry. I'm waiting to see how the whole USAir thing shakes out because I will be working in PHL for the next 2 years or so. If they're still around after January America West will be losing my revenue due to my disappointment.