Originally Posted by
ty97
I expect that could run into some legal challenges on the basis of age discrimination (though I'm not a lawyer). People could have started their FF journey with AA at various ages.
There was/is no one, simple, 100% equitable way to assign the million miler thresholds due to program history. Some people came from US, some from AA. Some pre-merger AA people got a lot of LT miles under the pre-2011 program, some got a few, some got little, some got none. Unless AA is going to go back and recalculate all those balances (and I doubt they even have the retained data to do so) then AA is just going to have to draw the best line in the sand they can. I suspect that line has been drawn based on AA's metrics of current membership at each LT tier. If those metrics change over time, perhaps the thresholds will as well.
I thought about the age angle as well and agree that there is no simple way to do this. It probably works out even with some of the old timers with lifetime status since they wont be flying as much.. I have 89/90 year old relatives, one has 6 million miles, the other 11 million miles, but they wont be flying so the status wont mean anything. The 69 year old relative with 6 million miles is very happy to move up the ladder. Count us among the ones that still find value in the program, we have been members since the early 80, redeemed our first award for 4 persons in First Class to Australia in 1998 and just flew to round trip to Vietnam last month on award redemptions, with many flights and wonderful travel in between. I'm doing better understanding loyalty point scheme, but you just have to play the game as the rules change.