Originally Posted by imaliveru
Wow. Your OP said "Changes (for the better)..." ...looks like you better start taking your own advice! You already decided it was "for the better." Maybe you should have held off on the post!
"Tweaking???" Where have you been? It doesn't need "tweaking" ... it needs ending! The "tweaks" you mention in your OP are ROTTEN, if true. Still making elites log in at 36 hours to get seats they previously got for free at time of booking??! Reducing the availability of seats to elites. Why???? "Never intended to target elite??????" What??? Why else have the elites pay $15 and not refund them if upgraded? Why take away available seats from them only to force them to log in 36 hours prior?! NW obviously didn't give a rip about elites. They were after $$$. If you took off your NW blinders, you'd see that.
Maybe it's not the greatest idea in the known universe. Neither is cattle class on WN. Or CO's 50% EQM crap, which bites me in the ... every time I fly to NY - 'cept I don't have much choice as it's either that or sit in an AA babyjet. NW tried something. First iteration sucked, lots of people liked it, lots complained.
Of COURSE they're after money. Isn't that the whole point of being in business? (Though the way things go with airlines over the last 20 years, you might have fooled me.)
I really do believe they didn't intend to go after elites - much. Look, they're management. They have NFC. I know. I'm management (at a different company). It's DAMN HARD to know what the right thing to do is, or what the right product will be, and you do your surveys and planning and still it comes out bad. And sometimes you ^&*( real hard. New Coke, anyone?
But I also imagine some people still drink Pepsi, even though Coke switched back years ago.
Please name these "several airlines." Besides Southwest. I assume you are talking about "full fare" carriers too. This seems to be a new argument. I don't remember even NW making it -- AFAIK, they just compared themselves to UA and Air Canada, both illegit comparisons.
Wow, wouldn't that be... most of them?
In retrospect, if they'd offered CC as seats other than what is currently P, maybe taking away the non-reclining exit rows, it would have worked better from the start.
As far as I'm concerned, they fixed the damn thing, or at least they tried. At least I'd like to believe so - it sounds as if they did, but we won't really know until we all see the seat maps in the system post-change and whether rows 5 and 6 are back. But the language is such that it seems to be the case.
Then all we'd need to see is some sort of "We're sorry" to the elites - even a token 5k/10k miles - as an acknowledgement that "Yes we made a mistake, we can't fix the past, but we can be sorry" (couched in some language with lots of legalese and not outright admitting it) and we can all move on.
As to complaints about being unfair to other Skyteam elites - is it fair that NW elites get upgraded before CO elites, and vice-verse? or that NW elites get squatto on DL? I'm NW plat and while I normally do get upgraded on my semi-weekly RDU-EWR CO run, it's far too often at the last minute so I _know_ I'm well down on the pile. Yeah, I don't like it. But I'm NW plat, not CO plat. I'll choose to be thankful that I get near-CO-plat treatment in the first place. It's still enough that I choose CO over AA. (That and I hate flying those damn AA jumpjets.)
I expect others to do some form of RoachChoice, and I expect that it'll be similarly unfair to the NW elites on other SkyTeam partners.
I imagine the 36-hour rule won't in the end matter much, as for most elites most of the time you'll get a P seat anyway - if they moved the CC seats back, it means there are more P seats, so the number of times you'd have to be concerned about it shrinks.
Then again I really suppose this whole thing hasn't bothered me much anyway - I'm hovering right around 100% on upgrades over the last 100k miles, especially on NW metal, so it's kind of a moot point.
And maybe I'm no one to talk, as if I don't get 5 or 6, I really don't care anyway, just give me a window somewhere as it'll take me a half hour to get off the plane because no one knows how to get their mega-bags out of the bins.
(TravelPro FlightCrew2 - the only way to fly!)
NW mgmt, you suck for introducing it and not thinking it through.
NW mgmt, thank you for listening.
--I wear glasses, not blinders, and I try not to jump to conclusions