Ok ok

The SWUs were a cruel joke.

I was pulling your leg.

But I did win one of the door prizes -- a (4) night stay at one of two Wyndham resorts (Telluride or Puerto Rico). Not bad.

And after talking my way into an upgrade on an award ticket, getting my rental car for half price, and walking away with a House of Miles staff T-Shirt I think I did alright.

Not to mention that I got to watch techgirl corner Robert Sahadevan of Mileage Plus and I got to watch Randy propose!

Definitely worth the price of admission!

I think you should have to give up your free trip to PR as penance.

One of the highpoints of my evening was being able to tell UA (without cursing) exactly what the overall FT community thinks about the changes to the 1K program.

And guess what guys... I've been right all along... UA doesn't care!

I will be the first to admit that my first "delurking post" is way overdue. I've been lurking for the past 5 months and love all the information available on FT, especially once I started using the search option.

Anyway, I flew to COS yesterday mainly out of curiosity. Randy's invitation to the House of Miles prior to the Freddies was the icing on the cake I couldn't resist. Little did I know I would also get the opportunity to chat with the infamous Sir Freddie Laker at the House of Miles too. I was also interested in meeting some of the FTers and seeing who people "really" are, so this seemed like a perfect first event.

I thoroughly enjoyed my entire "Freddies Experience" in all respects. However, the highlight was winning the Herman Miller chair. I will definitely be putting it to good use while reading FT and making future posts. Thank you SO MUCH Randy and staff for such a wonderful experience.

Pamela

techgirl -- I would be interested to hear more details about that conversation! And congratulations on doing it without cursing, I know that must have taken some effort.

Techgirl; was he responsive at all (even if to accept the fact we're all PO'd)? Or did he just try to brush you off?

I heard Randy say that Barbara (who's dir of market research) & Robert were here from UA, so I plowed through the crowd first to put in my 2cents worth re: the SWUs (as you all know, I've been very unhappy about the new policy).

Since techgirl mentioned at dinner (I was there to provide support and a glass of wine when she started sobbing when Randy got engaged & when the beloved Starwood lurker got his special award ) that because of the policy she refuses to fly UA international & goes on LH, & dallasflyer (on my other side) that he switched primarily to AA for the same reason & someone else mentioned he's now splitting btwn AA & UA because of the policy.

Anyway, I pointed them out to Jen & she went over for quite a while. dallasflyer had already left but I'm going to contact him to get info.

Anyway again - we got a lot of the corporate blurb from them, but Barbara said they are tracking - but (sit down everyone) they're not actually getting that much complaints. She said it seems that more are doing more of it on FT & not actually to UA. I mentioned that they probably needed the year to see the financial results of this misguided policy before perhaps rescinding it for next year, & she said if they heard from folk en masse (via 1K line, letters, etc - not just phone calls to the cust svc line) they might do it sooner (no promises).

Robert was patronizing, arrogant & basically told both techgirl & I that if we were unhappy we could of course switch to another airline. Too much to hope he gets let go I suppose. And I think part of it was usual UA arrogance & part of it was we were female.

Long story short - I'm going to do a separate post on the UA forum encouraging everyone to write, email, etc. So go there for more details on that.

Can I use my old SWUs I got yest w/ my $0 Thai ticket?

------------------
Sharon

I got to listen in as techgirl shared her experiences as a United customer with Robert Sahadevan of Mileage Plus.

She told him that the changes to United's top-level elite program were chasing her away. She said she was doing more *A instead of UA, and he said "great, we get a share of that revenue too." She also said she was tilting more to AA. His response: if that's a better decision for you, you should fly American.

He was very patronizing throughout, and it became clear that UA wasn't interested in building their loyalty program to attract her business, because apparently she just wasn't spending enough with them on each ticket to matter. (She told him her UA revenue figure last year was > $20k.)

Sahadevan's colleague was much more thoughtful, and asked whether restoring the ability of Systemwide Upgrades to their old rules but awarding them based on revenue rather than including them in the elite packet made sense. An interesting thought.

Sahadevan made one very telling comment. He said that for too long flyers have gotten more value out of the airline than their revenue was worth. He described the upgrades and bonuses received by elites who haven't paid high fares as "an inefficiency in the system."