keithguy

Thanks for the offer - sorta.

But what I was implying was that although SuperElites already do a lot of paid travel, they may still redeem a lot of miles, just not for themselves (for example, for a significant other). And there's the travelling businessman who travels on company money and then burns miles for a vacation for him and his family.

FlyerGoldII

To compare the Mileage Plus and Aeroplan awards data, I would also like to know the Mileage Plus denominator, in terms of number of members in that FF program.

Shareholder

I think that was already posted by KH yesterday: 40 million or so. It is the second largest FF program after AAdvantage. Both are in the 40 million member range. However, there are likely about 1 million elites.

AC has about 225K elites out of 6 million members, or about 4%. Just over 1% are Elites and SEs.

exAC

Have a daughter in her 20's and it is no problem to burn through twice that?

FlyerGoldII

So if I understand it correctly:

MP: 4 million awards redeemed/40 million members (ratio: 1 award/10 members)

AP: 1.4 million awards redeemed/7 million members (ratio: 1 award/5 members)

With statistics like these, I can now see how Aeroplan can look at statistics (at least selective statistics of the type listed above) and state that Aeroplan has one of the most successful FF programs in the wor;d. I can now understand their argument (altough that does not mean I agree with it) that further enhancements to the Aeroplan program are not necessary, and even be counterproductive to AC's bottom line - such as elimination of capacity controls (in one form, or another) for nonSEs.


As Shareholder has stated - there is more redemption through AP, than with MP. However, as implied in this and numerous other threads, the level of dissatisfaction with requests with AP awards, is much higher than with MP (due to the apparent higher failer rate of successful redemptions with AP than with MP - At least by members on this forum who are not SE).

I am wondering whether the average nonSE Aeroplan member (in the community who does not participate in this forum or this bulletin board) really appreciates the relatively low successful redemption rate of Aeroplan - esp with (selective) statistics listed above.

PS-Shareholder - sorry, I had missed KH's post.

B767

Something does not seem right with the analysis of MP redemptions in 2002. If the 7.8% (representing 4M miles) redeemed in 2002 is representative of the total number of MP miles outstanding in 2002 than that means there where only 51.4M total miles outstanding. With 40M members, that means the average balance would be just under 1.3 miles per member. Just doesn't seem right!

Pretty hard to redeem 1.3 miles for anything, not even a toaster!

LondonElite

I think the point is that the miles required to redeem the flights above represented 7.8% of the outstanding balance at the time.

The 4,011,132 that you are referring to in your calculation is the number of MP awards given (sum of the above three categories), not the total miles used.

msn

That is correct.

B767

Makes sense now!

Time for a coffee!

Shareholder

Let's consider that the average reward costs 50K MP miles. Then the 4 million reward tickets would represent 200 billion MP miles. And if that is 7% of the outstanding mileage, that balance is over 2 trillion miles! But at 2-cents a mile, that's also a helluva liability on UA's books.

msn

Like many U.S. airlines, they calculate the redemptions against the incremental increase in cost for things like additional fuel and food, with offsets like the payments from their partners. The Mileage Plus credit card is the number one card product in the United States.