Originally Posted by
FlyingBeanCounter
No, I am saying that hub captive is choice.
I live in DEN. That is a UA hub and I do fly UA from time to time. I have been 1K for about five years in addition to DL. Theoretically I would have concentrated my flying on UA and been GS (which I likely could have hit). I would have spent at least another 15k a year had I done that though. Many of my neighbors do just that using the hub captive argument. If you want to claim that being hub captive means you have to fly DL feel free. But that is an illusion. The rest of us do not have to believe that anyone is hub captive. It is a choice. Everyone makes them and lives with them.
I am perpetually confused by these arguments that seem to imply it is normal to (or many people do) fly circuitous routings, pay thousands extra, or whatever just for "loyalty" and "status". This seems insane to me. In most situations, I would expect one carrier to present a broadly favorable offering of price and schedule. Presumably this, not "status", is why you focus on a specific carrier to begin with.
After that, status provides a decent incentive to prefer that carrier. I am an MSP "hub captive". Much of the time there is no realistic choice but to fly Delta, because only Delta serves my destination nonstop, or Delta does so with many times the frequency. Then, with Delta status, I am going to prefer to fly Delta MSP-CHI even if it's $40 more than UA or AA because I can get free C+ and a decent shot at an upgrade to F. Or on a longer flight with head-to-head competition (say MSP-SFO, although the UA schedule is pretty borderline to be "competition"), Delta offers an effective $500 discount to me because I can clear my RUCs, so again I choose Delta. Flying to Europe, where *A actually is very competitive even out of a DL hub, DL offers me a $3,000 discount by use of my GUCs. Again, advantage Delta.
That's the "use" of status that I see, and in the end it has quite a bit of tangible value. But the only reason I am compounding on Delta in the first place is because I have no choice but to choose Delta if I am flying MSP-SAN, MSP-LAS, MSP-LAX, and so-on.