Originally Posted by
Counsellor
That concept is, if you'll pardon my saying so, rather simplistic. It may be true for some, but for others it is simply not the way the world works.
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You may argue that it would be easy for the person to save his miles by simply altering his crediting pattern, but the point is what would a sensible airline (which, remember, is selling this person thousands of dollars of tickets each and every year) think to gain by requiring the customer to modify his crediting behavior that is anywhere commensurate with what they have to lose by irritating him?
I don't pretend it's true for absolutely everyone, but the example you give is an extreme one.
And in any event, someone who is as savvy as that will have no difficulty finding a $10 purchase to make on a credit card that puts 10 miles into the UA account. They are not going to lose their miles. (I can confidently say this, because this is exactly what I do. Except that I've just
had to put £177 worth of tickets on my UA Visa, because my normal Mastercard got dinged by a fraudster at the weekend and has been cancelled and I'm still waiting for the replacement to turn up.)
The people that this policy "hurts" are, almost universally, the people who don't care enough about their miles even to do this much. And if they don't even care that much, they are unlikely to be diverting their spending to UA when they would not otherwise have bought from UA.
For the few who really are caught out by this, the airline has obviously made a judgement that the downside is worth the structural financial benefits of the change in expiry. And in the absence of all the marketing information that the airline has, who are we to say that that judgement call is wrong?