Science Goy

I was just wondering how many buzzards that kind of request adds to one's "Eagle rating"

halls120

No, it's COdbaUA. The HouCrew has taken over United WHQ, and have been driving UA into the gutter since June 2011. MP is a shell of what it was, on board catering has slipped, boarding is a rugby scrum, all elites are the same to management, and the previously excellent 1K desk is handicapped by a customer-unfriendly IT infrastructure.

My pre 3/3 flying was 80/20 UA/AA. Since 3/3 it has been 90/10 AA/UA. I started flying AA before they announced the free status match, and I'm staying for the duration.

unhappyflyer

[QUOTE=rob_flies_ua:18474183]You are correct and likely my figures are high. I forgot that my spend included my spouse and was 45k as a family. I consider myself typical and spent 32k last year mainly on a great deal of intra usa and some overseas for personal travel. I book mostly through the corporate site. I ended up with 120 k miles. This is well short of GS range.

kale73

Amen.

uxb

-1. There is no foundation for your statement. CO was the superior airline of the two in network, offers and range of services. Sure, you had to wait hours on the phone to speak w/ someone, but that's like almost every business in America today. If I were you, I'd count your lucky stars that UA never combined w/ US.

CMK10

I'm almost afraid to report this due to the (somewhat understandable) backlash here about the status matches, but my status on AA.com now shows me as Platinum as of this morning. At least I can't steal any EXP upgrades and I won't get SWUs, right?

ijgordon

I think on the whole, CO had the better reputation, certainly over the past 10 years. However, top-tier on UA had better benefits than on CO, so the UA 1Ks felt like they were treated better. Obviously 1K was more difficult to earn than CO Platinum (100k vs. 75k), and on a relative basis there were fewer of them. And then of course there were the Global Services members, CO didn't really have anything for the very top tier spenders until a year or so before the merger when they rolled out Presidential Platinum, and even that had a much lower spend threshold vs. UA GS. You could make a case that the pmCO management, assuming they really are driving the ship operationally, didn't have good experience catering to the very top tier of customers. And obviously they can be a demanding, entitled group.

AAerSTL

That would actually be great in hindsight, combine two abysmal carriers (UA and US) and have CO remain independent or merge with AA. Wouldn't pass the DOJ but would be a great merger of equals.

warreng24

Correct.

PMCO has always had "we're the best and everything that is done one way is the best way to do it" mentality. PMCO therefore started "standardizing" PMUA to the PMCO standard as things were integrated.

PMCO has finally started to realize that they DON'T have the best way of doing things and they've started to slowly open their minds (a little) and realize that some of the things that PMUA did was a better way to do them.

But as an aside, I also DO NOT LIKE the idea that a status matched 1K to EXP will automatically get the 8 SWU's. I'd be kinda annoyed if an EXP managed to status match to 1K and COdbaUA issued the 6 SWU's. However, the newly status-matched-1K should earn SWU's for each 50k of BIS they do (per the current 1K benefits).

flyer121

When did you send your information back to AA for the match?

CMK10

Yesterday at 9:22 AM Eastern

3Cforme

SWUs are an EXP benefit. You'll want to spend some time with this chart and its footnotes/hyperlinks, and the stickies/Wiki.

http://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/el...fits-chart.jsp

Flyer_70

I'm guessing he knows this.

halls120

"There is no foundation for your statement."

I hate to tell you this, but my statement was based on my opinion, which is a perfectly acceptable foundation.

I realize that the RRWTB pmCO crowd believes that everything concocted in Houston was objectively perfect, but that is just a fantasy.

pmCO may have had a superior network if you lived in Houston or New York. It had next to no presence in Chicago, DC, San Francisco and LA. In fact, the one good thing about the merger is that the new United now does have a superior network.

Given the choice of Doug Parker or Jeff Smisek running an airline, I'd take Dougie in a second.

In any event, I'm on the dAArk side now, and pretty darn happy about it.

Thunderroad

While I sympathize, I'll beg to differ with the many here who are feeling some very understandable displeasure over this AA status matching offer. If attracting some business away from UA helps AA emerge from BK in better shape and therefore maintain the last good USA FF program, we all will benefit. And if this move puts some good competitive pressure on UA to halt or even reverse the steep downward spiral in its own FF program and overall service, that's also a good thing.

Yeah, as a current EXP this creates some potential additional upgrade and award competition for me, and I grant that these are big "if's" that I'm speculating about. But I think the risk is worth it.