In reference to our recent discussions on the new Automatic Elite Upgrades, and why I am so opposed to them, so opposed to the royal shafting it will give gold and silver elites, and generally opposed to anything that messes with a plan that is working (as I've said, the mantra is if it ain't broke, don't fix it!, I offer the following:


On December 6, 1999 Gordon Bethune gave a speech at the Quality New Jersey Meeting & Award Ceremony sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce in Morris County, New Jersey.

The following are excerpts from the exact text of his presentation. He knows that messing with the best rated frequent flyer program is wrong.

"We actually had been experimenting with a Continental Lite, which was an airline with-in an airline that didn't have first class seats and no food. And we had a bunch of people who were upset with us and didn't know what kind of service to expect and was [sic] almost uniformly disappointed..."

"And so we just decided rather than hire Bain & Company why don't we just put things back the way there were."

"We had an award winning frequent flyer program. For years we had been the best frequent flyer program in America, until the lawyers and accountants fixed it. And we dropped to the bottom.... why don't we just put it back and we did. We restored the frequent flyer program to exactly same specifications that had been award winning, wrote all of our customers a letter of apology, and invited 60 of our
best customers to my house to announce the fact that we had listened and had put it back an apologized for our behavior."

"We started putting Continental product back to where it had been in the places where it could make some money and today 'Fly To Win' works for us, and as was mentioned we we've won the J. D. Power & Associates award for the last three out of four years."


This is a smart man. I wonder why he's letting the lawyers and accountants get away with it again.

I don't know if I can legally distribute copies of the tape, but it was recorded at a public forum, so I certainly don't have a care about telling about it.

Mr. Bethune? Mr. Brenneman?, Mr. Bergsrud? Do you care to comment on why this hard learned lesson is being ignored?



[This message has been edited by NJDavid (edited 11-03-2000).]

David, I have to disagree. The upgrade program HAS been broken for the longest of time. Upgrades in the "old" program (pre-automatic upgrades) went not to the member with the highest qualifying elite status, but to the elite member who, regardless of status, had quick dialing fingers and stayed up late.

I will agree that the order of processing the upgrades with the new automatic program is less than desireable for golds and particularly silvers because of the consideration of fare basis. Also, given the comments on these boards, the system needs to have some kinks worked out. All in all though, I support the new program.....now if Gordon would just listen and get rid of the silly 30 day rule on international upgrade awards, perhaps CO would get back to being the #1 FF program.

So maybe they are still listening!

I have to disagree with your disagreement

The upgrades did go "to the member with the highest qualifying elite status" if they played by the published rules of the program that were equitably administered.. Now the rules are being blown out of the water at the end of the year.

I've made all these points before, but here goes again, they're all worth repeating.


EUA: Bad Idea

Half thought out scenarios
Half a$$ed implimentation
Half of affected members not even notified
More than half of the elites will get less upgrades
Half of the NW-CO alliance not prepared
Half as much of a One Pass program

also

1) They're skewing the program again to the upper spenders, or the "elite, elite". This hurts the lower and mid elite and the economy traveler at all levels.

2) They're doing it IN THE MIDDLE / END OF THE YEAR AGAIN!!!. Hey, if this is announced in January, maybe I and others pick another company to fly on for the year. To be a person planning out my 25k or 50k milles of loyalty and expecting a specific level of service, to now find out that that service will be rare or non-existant unless I reach 75K, or expecting a level of service for 75K, and finding out that the equation is now more heavily influenced by $$ than the loyalty miles I've been working on all year is an insulting slap in the face. It's like changing the rules to the world series to only 2 outs per inning...fair people don't change the rules in the middle of the game. Fair companys (one's running a loyalty program) ought to know what changing the rules in the middle of the game does to loyalty.

3) As the radio commercial I'm listening to just said, "...winning Inside Flyer's Freddie awards and J.D. Power's awards for best frequent flyer program three years in a row..." You have a system here that has struck the PERFECT balance to please all of it's customers - at all levels from twice a year flyer to Platinum elite. WHY CHANGE SOMETHING THAT EVERYONE LIKES AND THAT ISN'T BROKEN?????????? I've read these forums...So have some of the folks from Continental I suspect. Have we asked for this??? Even hinted at this??? I've never seen a word about it. I've seen (thanks Boomer) a pretty comprehensive annual list of what changes and improvements to One Pass that we, the elite, loyal flyers would like to see (more and better international upgrade possibilities, ability to use miles for President's club memberships, additional awards for Platinums over 100K, etc.). This stupid autoupgrade change then not only represents a slap in the face to all of the people who use the system and are not the top tier and highest payers, but it's also an additional slap in the face to all of the elite flyers who voiced what would represent good changes to them, and who have been completely ignored.

4) But the most egregious part of the new system is that the process is taken out of the hands of the passenger, and placed into an unknown computer system that will never be trusted to have fair criteria. There are no longer clear-cut rules we can follow or be sure are enforced (or have long forums chatting about - like the EST-CST-Location of flight midnight or the release of A to F seats). We now have a sysytem that rests squarely behind the curtain. "Don't worry, trust us. We'll automatically upgrade the 50 elites on this flight into the 12 available seats by our own criteria." Now if that doesn't raise a red flag with you, I have a bridge to sell you. What if you and someone else bought your ticket at exactly the same time at exactly the same fare? Who gets the upgrade? The person who has done the most business? Gordon's friend? The new company account that the business group is trying to sign? Any system that takes this out of the hands of the elite passenger and into the "computer" of the airline is by it's very nature unfair.


I would have hoped that the intelligent people here would recognize that a company that would change the rules in the middle of the game in a way that hurts many customers and helps others (weather or not the specific change at hand puts them in the helped group) and hides the criteria in a way that at any given instance they can pull whatever tricks they want and no one would know, is hurting all of their customers in the long run.

Remember, this is the industry that required an act of congress to tell you what the lowest available fare is. This is a company that still reports your flight will leave on-time when the aircraft hasn't even arrived at the departure gate with 5 minutes to go. This is a company that boasts a terriffic on-time record by padding the schedules with their anticipated daily delays at the gate and on the runway (the 30 minute flight that waited 1 hour to take off is still reported to "arrive early").

Get with it folks. Weather you happen to be enjoying it at the moment or not, we the customer are being screwed by this.

We will no longer be able to talk about an agent who didn't follow the rules to give you an upgrade (we will not see the rules, and will not have a way to know if they were followed.) We will assume the people who got the upgrade ahead of us paid more, booked earlier, etc. with no way to verify. The ITN advantage is totally neutralized ("...I see you have 2 available F seats, I qualify for one so give it to me..."), as now it doesn't matter how many upgrades are left, CO will just give them to whoever they choose. Do you REALLY believe that this industry and this company will administer this criteria honestly and fairly? Based on what? How can you check that it was done that way? Will CO release to you the records of amount paid and date booked of all their upgraded passengers? WAKE UP!!!

This is just bad and dumb. It definetly hurts the passengers, and will eventually hurt the airline (though not immediately.) The lemmings will always follow each other off the cliff. Be a lemming if you wish (because it happens to feel good at the moment), or complain and vote with your feet and dollars. But in any case, please do wake up.



[This message has been edited by NJDavid (edited 10-30-2000).]

It's about control. All the airlines want to be able to decide (in broad terms) who is getting these perks...and now they have the technology to do it. The sad thing is, most people just want to get out of the deplorable conditions in Coach. 20 years ago, nobody cared where they sat. You had legroom, a decent meal, crew that didn't treat you like a bum, and frequently an empty seat next to you. What I don't understand is, with full coach fares almost always guaranteed the upgrade at time of purchase, the suggestion is that the remainder of those seeking the upgrade are on discounted fares.That's a relatively level playing field, and begs the question, why are they so consumed with monitoring this process, and what's the real motive?

David,

Let me start by pointing out that I agree with you. This change should not have taken place mid-year.

I also agree that Gold's and Silver's who used to work the system are going to get screwed.

Basically, the only point that we disagree on is your contention that the system was not broken.

I LOVED working the system. I had no problem staying up, nor did I have a problem checking ITN 10 times a day. But, not even everyone here on FT liked the old system (JL2 is the most prominent, but not the only one).

My thinking is this: We here at FT all share a love of working the FF program system. But, we are a small percentage of FF's. Most FF's really could care less about miles and upgrades (I know, HERESY).

I would be willing to guess that the number of elite's participating here is very small, maybe around 5% or less of CO's elites. For all we know, the other 95% have been calling and writing CO that they hated the call-in system.

I can think of MANY examples of CO screwing this up, but sorry, the "It ain't broke" example is not one of them.

One problem with NJDavid's lengthy, well written argument, that I have is that Bethune recognized some problems previously which negatively effected ALL users of OnePass, and so he took steps to put things back for ALL users.

EAU is different. There are clearly at least two distinct groups of users:

Class 1 users would be those users who purchase discounted fares and/or have lower levels of Elite status, and prefer the old dialup system out of self-interest, rightly so, as the dialup system provides them with a better opportunity to get upgrades than does EAU.

Class 2 users are those users who have higher Elite status, demonstrating a propensity to add profitability to CO over the LONG term, as well as users on full fare tickets, demonstrating a propensity to fuel profitability to CO in the SHORT term. These users prefer EAU, because EAU is more equitable for them. And CO prefers to look after the interest of these Class 2 people, because they enhance shareholder value more than do Class 1 people, and the central job of any management team is to increase shareholder value.

People argue from positions of self interest. That's why so much frantic argument about EAU or NO EAU here on these boards. It would be hard to say that in light of the huge amount of discussion, there are not these 2 groups (at least).

And that's why this time Bethune and crew's changes are different: they are designed to remedy what is (at least a perceived) inequity WITHIN the OnePass system, NOT changing, correcting, altering or whatever, OnePass as a WHOLE.

So, to cite back to Bethune's prior strategy as to this, its just apples and oranges when analyzed in this way.

[This message has been edited by thesilb (edited 10-30-2000).]

I said it before and I'll say it again: I have to agree with NJDavid (and not because he's a friend and not because he presents an excellent argument.)

We are dealing with computers. Computers make mistakes. Computers break down. It could work in my favor, it could not.

Again, I cannot say if this upgrade program is going to work for me. But here's my vision: I'm going to be stuck in coach for about 90 percent of the time.

*I'll flying out of EWR, a hub airport and going to IAH, another hub airport.
*There are Platniums (some who care about the program, some who don't even follow their accounts and could care less about first class but would take it anyway)
*I'm a lowly silver and that does not have as much clout as a Gold or Platnium.

I hope I don't regret spending some $$$ and time trying to requalify for SIlver and then ending up with the barefoot people and the obxonious seat mate behind me who keeps shoving my seat up.

Personally, if it's not broke, why fix it (and break it even worse.)

I agree with each of you to some extent.

Making this change in the middle of the night, with no offical(yes we on flyertalk had leaks of it) notice late in the year was wrong.

Someone who fly extra flight to make silver so they'd get upgrades next year, now finds out the rules have changed very late in the game. Where have we seen this before?

Oh yes, now I remember Continental pulled the same "october surprise" in 1998, when they rasied the mileage level for elites from 20000/35000/50000 to 25000/50000/75000.

As for thesilb's class of user, I guess as a platinum I'm a class 2 and I dont like the EUA system. One size doesn't fit all. I do agree that self-interest is the issue, I've said all along I'm close to 100% on upgrades so I like the old system. Whether that means it isnt broken is subjective. To me the old system wasn't broken.

I agree that you don't fix something that isn't broken. The system probably was broken, at least for some people.

Obviously, some Platinums will get upgraded more often (those who don't place the importance on UGs that most of us here do). Those people do exist, but who knows how large their ranks are. As a result, some Golds and Silvers will get upgraded less.

I don't blame CO for wanting to take care of their best customers. I really don't think this will be a huge blow to lower-level elites. My guess is that Golds and Silvers will see their UG percentage drop no more than 10 points. At least that's what I'm hoping.

For me, at least, PHX seems to be pretty easy for UGs now, so I'll probably do alright.

And, announcing at the end of the year really stinks, as many have noted. Basically, it's the old bait and switch.

Flying transcon (or to any popular destination) out of a CO hub like EWR, a gold elite already has very small percentages of upgrades. Reducing them by 10% means upgrades, on routes to LAS, LAX, SFO, etc., will almost never happen.

And silver elites on these routes, well they might as well just be given passes to check in at the FC counter and board early, because that IMHO is the only benefit they will receive.

All of this made worse, of course, by the recent revelation that Continental is shipping out complimentary, unsolicited platinum elite cards, placing a customer they want to attract ahead in the upgrade line of someone who say flew 65k miles on the airline for the last 10 years.

And then, add to that, the committment that CO is making to narrow body planes (737s) and very tight pitch seats in coach, and you have a formula to gain some high paying customers and loose a whole bunch of your middle customer base.


WWW.denycontinentalthefreddie.com

I have stated my opposition to the idea of the EUA ad-nauseaum. The point of "denycontinentalthefreddie" is to have a forum, if one is needed, to publish passenger discontent and act as a group.

I've been trying for a couple of weeks to get someone from CO to even address my concerns. Fair play (a concept they may not be familiar with) indicates that I should give them more time to reply to me...but after e-mailing Onepass three times, Customer care (via the web form) once and Gordon Bethune directly once, the time is running out.

Currently, the link only comes here - to a fair discussion on Flyertalk that I chose because it includes those of us "pro" and "con". I may let the site die, or start a page similar to the "saveskymiles" one. The Jury is still out until the questions are answered (or I feel that enough time has passed to conclude they have been ignored).

The questions are:

Why was the EUA imposed rather than announced?
Why have specific attempts to contact and inform elites of this change not been made? (I still have received no notice or e-mail.)
Why were the feelings of Elite flyers not actively solicited, but rather just assumed?
Why was a change made to One Pass immediately, when One Pass's own rules state CO has the right to make changes with 60 days notice?
Why was this system put into place without thinking out all of the ramifications (like people who don't want upgrades being forced to take them and not being able to sit next to their traveling companions on full flights)?
Why, after the debacle of a few years ago, did CO think it appropriate to fundamentally change the program in October AGAIN after people had already earned status levels for the following year? Why didn't CO announce this in January 2001 to take effect in January 2002?
Why is CO, despite the promises of the last October switch, distributing unsolicited, complimentary platinum elite status, placing potential new customers ahead of their loyal silver and gold elites?

I have asked these questions in good faith, and they remain unanswered as of today. So as far as I am concerned, the whole thing is still a discussion. It is up to CO to determine my next steps - either remaining a loyal customer who's needs are addressed, or being alienated into organizing a protest.

[This message has been edited by NJDavid (edited 11-03-2000).]

There's another drawback to Auto Upgrades that I don't think has been addressed here yet.

Supposed I do not WANT to be upgraded?

Supposed I have a business trip ticketed, and then decide to take my family, or just my wife. We have adjacent seats in coach, I on the aisle and my wife next to me.

Auto upgrade kicks in. I get upgraded. My wife remains in a middle seat. The flight is full, and there is no way for me to move back.

So despite having made travel plans months and months in advance, even when there WERE seats available, my wife is stuck in a middle seat in coach.

Just a scenario, but I can see this as a real possibility

Ronin:

I believe that my friend NJDavid raised that exact point in an earlier thread.

As for being stuck in FC, I'm sure you could find some coach passenger that won't need too much arm-twisting to switch with you.

Bringing this thread to the top, just to reiterate that the questions above have still not been answered.

Also, about a month into the EUA debacle (this year's October suprise) I and others have personally witnessed spouses and business associates being seperated against their express wishes by the EUA. It almost caused a riot on an EWR-LAS flight on 11/12 (not me so stop snikering). A Platinum elite was booked by his company travel agent, his wife (a Silver elite) by hers. They specifically intended to get seats together in the back of the plane. He was EUA'd (a system he had NEVER heard of). The flight was oversold. He (a lawyer) was quite upset. He took out his "2000 pocket elite guide" from the
Presidents club and asked the gate agent where it said anything about EUA.

Even those of you who support the stupid EUA system surely must agree it should be modified so that it must be requested at ticketing to be invoked. You can still get on the stupid, unfair automatic upgrade list anytime you wish, but by NOT requesting it, you could ensure that you DON'T get one when you don't want.

I guess it was more important for Continental to shove this half a$$ed plan down our throats than to think it out.

I_am_not_docile_OZSTAMPS@denycontinentalthefreddie .com

He, he. What a program, changing it in mid year was bad policy. Seems dumb I agree. It seems as an observer from afar, that the highest level Platinum is clearly where to be. I know making 75K is not easily possible for everyone, but it certainly is way less miles than UA for instance requires for making 1K status.

I hear from a CO Platinum that for $150-200 many times you can do LAX-Florida via EWR one day r/t runs that yield around 7,000 flown miles. One of them every couple months on a spare weekend day and you are 100% Platinum for way, way under $2000 and never need to pack your passport even.

So it is clearly possible for a determinded leisure flyer to make Platinum if that status is deemed that important to acheive. Randy just started a "Mileage Run" Forum for all of us who need to "top up" status late year etc, and need to find cheap deals, on ALL airlines.

Yes, the 1P and 2P UA members probably also wish they got more upgrades. So do lower level AA flyers etc. Hey, so do ALL flyers. I wish I was as wealthy as Bill Gates at times, so we can all aspire to a few levels up! Writing to Microsoft complaining about why I don't have the same money as Bill ain't gonna get an answer either. I surmise not many of the critical posts above are from Platinums, who seem generally content with their lot?

All I know is qualifying on 100K+ flown on UA this year (entirely on leisure travel btw) has unlocked astounding rewards from UA in return for that business. And that is the true aim of all smart FF programs. CO seem to be doing the same. Reward the travellers most who do the most miles/segments. That then gives all other Elite level members something to aim for next year. And spend more money with CO to get there. I recall CO is a publicly listed company? They are in the business of making a PROFIT. Fly a lot and CO makes money. They like that idea.

And Pleeeeeeeeeeeez ... the thread I posted had RANDY or his staff saying that CO flyers were "docile". That is a word several light years apart from the one word definition I would have given, if asked for it.

------------------
~ Glen ~



[This message has been edited by ozstamps (edited 11-22-2000).]