Originally Posted by
vysean
Is it time to organize a protest like when DL and earlier US east shenanigans were pulled?
Paging easties who are familiar with the 0 miles issue @:-)
And yeah, this is total BS.
Expect something in the next day or so. In the meantime, here's some handy email addresses:
[email protected] - Phone number is 480-693-2341
[email protected] - Vice President, Reservations and Inventory Services
[email protected] - Vice President, Sales and Marketing
[email protected] - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
[email protected] - Senior Vice President, People, Communication and Culture
[email protected] - President
[email protected] - Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
[email protected] - Senior Vice President, Customer Service
reported to be a bad address - Jim
[email protected] - Senior Vice President, Planning and Alliances
[email protected] - Senior Vice President, East Coast, International and Cargo Operations
[email protected] - Vice President, Philadelphia Operation
also reported to be a bad email address - Jim
[email protected] - Vice President Customer Service Planning
[email protected] - Vice President, Revenue Management
Like others, this makes absolutely no sense to me for the following reasons:
- This will provide zero additional direct revenue - the miles are carried as a liability on the balance sheet until redeemed, when they show up in the P&L as an expense.
The number of "unflown" miles/segment is relatively small (from 1 to 410 using DOT mileage) - it would take a lot of short-haul segments to earn enough "unflown" miles for any type of award.
- This will affect the short-haul elite who is often providing a high yield already (as has been said) and also often on a RJ or turboprop without the "normal" perks of elite status - a few "free" miles is a small bone to throw them.
- At the end of the day, US controls the expense of miles redemption - award availability.
My hunch, and that's all it is, is that they're seeing a disturbing redemption trend - a higher percentage of miles being redeemed on *A/codeshare partners. I suspect that those redemptions are about the most expensive for US (other than possibly lost revenue from otherwise being able to sell an award seat on US). I'm guessing that they see this as an easy way to lower award redemptions going forward - short-haul is a smaller percentage of traditional HP flying than it is of the East operation plus most of the West short-haul is in competition to real lcc's and thus low yield. Just another example of their universe only existing west of the Mississippi.
Jim