Originally Posted by chaz1102
For those of you so lucky to be in an AA town I don't see the prob with qualifying elite. I am in ATL and make my plat status, not to easy from here on AA metal. Seems like I am always gong to have to go through DFW or ORD.
That's kind of what I was thinking. Given that many elites maintain status out of a non-hub airport, I find it a bit unrealistic that any airline would lower status for people based out of the hub airport because of schedule reductions at the hub airport.
I'll use myself - a GLD at AA, pushing towards PLT - as an example. My home airport, RNO, currently has 12 daily flights on AA/AS where I can earn Q-miles and Q-points on AA. (The breakdown is 4x to LAX, 3x to SEA, 3x to DFW, and 2x to ORD.) In the next month or so, though, we're losing 1x to ORD - and we lost 1x to DFW in August and 1x to SEA not long after.
A reduction from 14 in August to 11 in November is just under a quarter of our daily flights on AS/AA completely removed from the schedule. Yet I don't see any move for AA to lower my qualifying thresholds for 2005. Given that, there's no excuse for ORD or DFW (where their schedule cutbacks are a drop in the bucket in comparison, percentagewise) to get a similar benefit.
Mike