gosh, for such a brutal Topic title this thread certainly has had "legs."

Just thought you should be careful at who you "think" is nonrev in first class just because they have:

1) A uniform resembling an airline outfit
2) Crew tags attached to luggage
3) An ID on a lanyard resembling an "airline" ID

I work for a company that requires me to travel with all of that and guess what. They pay full fare same day of travel fares while we commute to our assigned aircraft. We accrue all of the miles and we are generally elite status on more than one airline. If I don't get aqn upgrade I use my miles for them.

We fly strictly corporate airplanes and to date my company alone has over 2000 pilots that airline to and from work every week on "commercial" airlines.

Another one of those check the mirrors before throwing the stones

Didja ever hear the expression that there are lies, dam* lies and statistics?

If CO were so interested in it's reward stats, instead of saying 1.5 million awards were redeemed, they'd say how many of them were "extortion pass", how many were on the 3rd, 4th or 5th try, etc.

Give this thread up folks. While there are many great people at CO and most have begun to see how bad their management is, the folks posting here have definitely had one too many sips of the kool-aid.

Just wanted to point out that the miles are by no means "free in the first place," nor are they "given," strictly speaking. Airline loyalty programs are subsidized by ticket sales; in other words, CALGal, we're all paying for our miles just as surely as we're writing your paycheck. (Incidentally, I think it's quite ironic that people often talk about "earning" miles.)

Please don't take this personally--I tend to agree with parts of your argument, but hope that you understand that one reason people get so worked up about all this is that the miles, not to mention the myriad other promised benefits of OP, are paid for. Now, the fact that much of the time we ain't paying all that much is a different story entirely...

Doesn't anyone here realize that "You are preaching to the choir"? There are, what?, maybe 100 - 500, elites who post in this forum. And, there's one thing for sure,
you are not going to change what you cannot control. Sure, one can control his own "movement" to another airline. But, then, if you did "move your business", you could just migrate to other airline forum, and maybe "the choir" over there has many more voices.

As NJDavid says under his # of posts, "**NEW UA PremEX***, CO Plat flying NW". He has spoken with his dollars. NJDavid has tried for a number of years to change the CO philosophy for BF upgrades, etc., but to no avail.

I'm a CO Platinum flying totally domestic out of IAH. I've been 100% upgrades on outbound flights (except RJ's), and 99.99% upgraded on returns and have not used any miles for upgrades. Now, I can understand the point on International BF upgrades, but there is absolutely no way that I can change this CO policy, so no control, no frustration, and I'm a much happier person.

Now that I'm finished with the sermon, Let us Pray.

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"The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You"