msn

For 2002 Mileage Plus offers the following statistics:

Number of United Airlines flights awarded: 2,020,250

Number of United Airlines upgrade awards: 1,406,716

Number of partner airline flights awarded: 584,166

Total number of Mileage Plus awards given: 4,011,132

Percent of all Mileage Plus miles used for 2002 awards above: 7.8%

FlyerGoldII

Is the last percentage relate to the fraction of total seats, that were awarded?

If so, do you know what percentage of Mileage Plus award requests, were actually successful (corresponding to the first request, in terms of origin and destination city, and dates)?

Shareholder

No, the 7.8% likely represents the percentage of outstanding MP miles used to redeem these reward seats.

msn

Shareholder is correct - the percentage given reflects the portion of all miles in the Mileage Plus program redeemed for the flight awards I listed for the year 2002.

Number of toasters awarded: 0

Shareholder

Interesting numbers, though. And may explain why UA always seems to have award inventory while AC does not. My point being there are likely 40 million members of UA's MP program. If there were only 2.080 million trips issued, that means fewer than 5% of members even bothered to order awards. And the likelihood is this number is far lower, since many would be requesting two or more seats.

MP issued half as many upgrade awards, which also serves to reduce the net demand on award inventory per se. We also know that UA's C cabins are larger than AC's, some aircraft having more than twice AC's number of seats on offer for awards as well as upgrades. Business cannot be that good in the past two years that these cabins are heavily sold out with revenue passengers, so lots of inventory for upgrades and awards. And of course, every upgrade to a front cabin, opens up more inventory to be sold or given away in the back.

It is also a proven fact that Americans travel far less than do Canadians, and that they are less likely to fly outside the US when travelling than are residents of just about any other G7/EU country. So demand for award seats will always be lower on US carriers.

LondonElite

7.8% seems fairly high to me. I wonder whether the calculation really is:

Total MP miles used in 2002 / Total MP miles outstanding

or some variation, since the total outstanding is enormous. I'm sure that even a guesstimate of the average flight 'price' in MP miles divided by 0.078 will give a much lower total outstanding figure than is the case.

msn

I don't think it is as extreme as you think - you have to think of the millions of accounts that have less than the amounts required for an award, as against the "professional mileage accumulators" who max out every opportunity to build up a balance and then fly first class half way around the world every month or so.

My entire reason for posting this is to show that Air Canada - Aeroplan should do the same by releasing their numbers, and letting the customers decide for themselves who is offering the best opportunity to redeem awards.

Shareholder

Aeroplan has been running a series of ads recently, and one appearing in this morning's NATIONAL PEST claims that an Aeroplan travel reward is issued/booked every 4 seconds. By my calculations, this puts the annual number of trips at 2,076,800, which is almost the same number of trips awarded on UA in MP. As my previous post suggests, this supports my contention that Aeroplan has a higher redemption level, and thus activity level among members than do the US programs. This would explain why things are tight at times on AC, but capacity on UA readily available [it does operate almost twice the capacity than does AC].

msn

If your math is 365 days x 24 hours in a day x 60 minutes in an hour x 60 seconds in a minute, then if it is every 4 seconds in the 31,536,000 seconds in a year, they are claiming to issue 7,884,000 tickets a year.

If that were the case, why would they not say so?

msn

Oh, and just to extend the thinking a step further, 7,884,000 x $25 booking fee would see Aeroplan collecting $197,100,000 per year just for that one fee, meaning Aeroplan would be able to buy Air Canada with all the "fee cash".

Shareholder

Sorry, that should be every 15 seconds, or 4 a minute.

msn

Okay, that means 2,102,400 tickets per year, with a total of $52,560,000 just based on the $25 fee. Just how much upgrading of Aeroplan's services do they have in mind - the renovations at Air Canada headquarters?

FlyerGoldII

I would be interested in the awards redeemed/awards requested ratio (with awards redeemed relating to original request by the customer) of the 2 frequent flyer plans - from Shareholder's comments, I would say that this ratio is much higher for Mileage Plus.

Shareholder

Likely so, since UA has a lower percentage of members rrequesting awards, more seats flying to more popular destinations. AC has more members requesting awards, flies far fewer seats and has many fewer "prime" routes that would be most popular for award redemption. Thus there is more pressure on AC than UA.

LondonElite

I guess that was my thinking...there must be hundreds of thousand of accounts with a sort of dormant account status that will increase the denominator of the 7.8% calculation.

But I wholly agree with the bigger picture, that AC should release the same data.