Originally Posted by iapetus
I feel your pain, traumamed. I've got two 500-mile certs that are about to expire at the end of October. I'd much rather use them than have them turn into 1,000 RDMs (sure, better than nothing, but ...). I've got two trips coming up next month: r/t LAX-LAS and r/t LAX-MSY. I tried finding some itineraries that would allow me to upgrade between LAX and MSY, but they were just too expensive and the timing too inconvenient (I want as many full nights down in the French Quarter (and elsewhere) as possible!). So, unlike traumamed, I did know ahead of time that I was getting flights I couldn't upgrade, but it would have been nice had I been able to finagle it somehow.
I just moved down here for grad school...count on me to be loyal to UA when TUS-based and fly all those UX spoke flights, only to move out of TUS mere weeks before UA mainline made its triumphant return there. Rant over.
I pulled up the master schedule for UA/UX flights into and out of MSY, and yeah, anyone coming in or out of here is either stuck on Ted or UX. I prefer UX to Ted personally, but a lot of people don't like the RJ's. More to the point iapetus, it seems the way to get around the Ted cancer is to fly via ORD. The ORD-MSY and MSY-ORD flights are all UX. Alternatively you could also fly via CLT or SAT, but if I'm not mistaken those are US codeshares, which is just about as bad as Ted. Man, when did I get so picky?
PS - French Quarter is great, but be careful, this city is ridiculously crime-ridden right now. Three of my classmates have already had "incidents," all while coming back from the Quarter.