<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by lopez151:
Regarding "discretionary" or unpublished Plat benefits on NW...
I'm only a sliver but what RC's talking about is a general willingness at the airline to maybe do something extra, or bend the rules here and there for Plats where they might not fo it for Golds and Silvers.
I have had one personal experience with standard award availability becoming available by virtue of my being elite. What happened was, I was trying to redeem WBC to Asia and there was (of course) poor availability. So I said something like "I understand that you folks are willing to occasionally call the inventory management desk and get extra standard space opened up for award travel." The agent said she'd be happy to, but that they don't always help out. When she came back, they had cleared space on a more direct DTW-NRT-BKK for me.
I think this is the kind of thing RC referred to.</font>
That's exactly what they do.
The WBC award seat that doesn't exist and is created in 5 minutes is only (1) unwritten benefit, there a lot of other goodies, but we can't give out all our secrets, right?
I've had standard WBC award tickets created by the elite line and inventory management at least 6 times. It's just good business for the airline to respond positively and to give you (the good customer) what you want at the least expensive price point.
If you fly every week (or lets just say - A lot) on nwa and have the banked miles and want to go to AMS, CDG, HKG, HNL or domestic they can "clear" standard space (some kind of discretionary waiver of the rules) to make the award ticket available to you (you are nwa's good customer and they want to keep you happy) and there are other benefits too.
If your flights canceled Plat Elites get rescheduled before the Gold and Silver Elites and Base numbers/non members of Worldperks.
There is more "flexibility" built in to the worldperks program for very active nwa pax.
It may see unfair to the infrequent pax, but the loyal active flier is the prefered pax for nwa.
High Yield pax is another story for another topic.
RC