Distribution of elites
 

Okay, here's a question that has been nagging me for sometime now. Not that it is really important, but I've been wondering what the distribution of elites is. Are there more silvers than golds? More golds than plats? What percentage of elites fall into each bucket?

CO Insider posted information on this topic some time ago.

The answer is in the FAQ.

I am surprised that there are 420,000 people who would be elite just on this airline. I wonder how much that will decrease in an economic downturn?

They all tried to board my DEN-IAH flight last Friday afternoon at the same time.

Note per the Skyteam fact sheet:

http://www.skyteam.com/EN/aboutSkyte...t_aug08_EN.pdf

There are 35.1M Onepass members (or at least that many accounts issued over the last 21 years). 500,000 or more Elite members is not out of line. CO has a lock on its hubs at EWR, IAH, CLE.

And my ORD-EWR flight as well (Thursday, 4:20 pm). Even though I was a bulkhead row, the overhead bins were already packed by the time I got on. Couldn't even squeeze it in the shared first-class/bulkhead bin.

I think I was 34th on the list (silver elite, and on an I fare).

Okay, thanks for the link to the info. What I was trying to figure out is what the ratio on any given flight will be (on average). Taking the numbers from above, I make the following assumptions:

1) The type of flights that elites take doesn't vary on average per type of elite (e.g. there Silvers are just as likely to fly IAH-CDG as Golds as one of their flights).
2) Silvers average 30 flights per year, golds 60, plats 90.

From that I multiplied the 30,60, and 90 by 250, 110, and 60 to get 7500, 6600, and 5400 (total flights per year in thousands by elite status). From there I can get the ratios that for each Plat on a flight, on average there will be 1.22 golds and 1.39 silvers.

This is useful because... Okay, not very useful, but you might be able to tease out odds of an upgrade (as a silver) based on how many seats are left prior to the 24 hour EUA run (taking out the inventory that was held back).

Not sure that I agree with those ratios. If there are 250,000 Silver, 110,000 Gold and 60,000 platinums, shouldn't the ratio between 1.83 Gold members per platinum, and 2.27 Silvers per gold?

This is an interesting analysis. I've often wondered what the distribution of elites is per flight, and having these proportions (along with a count from the PDA upgrade list) will give a good ball park estimates.

initially i was depressed seeing that there are 59,999 other plats out there wanting ewr-lax and ewr-sfo upgrades. and then i remembered that its a moot point since no upgrades ever clear on those routes. on the brighter side my favorite 14c/d seat price for jan is down to about $320 w/tax

Our EWR-IAH and IAH-EWR are regularly over 50 on the upgrade list. We have a flight IAH-EWR on 11/5 where F is already booked 22/25. That one may go over 60 on the Standby List. The route / and other factors matter more than your status for many EUA's.

No, because a plat will fly at least 1.5 times more than a gold. So, the ratio of gold : plat on an average flight will be less than 1.83.

How did you arrive at this??? I am a Platinum and certainly have not flown even 60 flights a year - probably less.

Maybe so if one's flying consists mainly of a short shuttle between two close cities, but a considerable proportion reach elite status by flying few long-haul trips.

I'd say that's a safe assumption, if not a 40/70/100 segments for each elite status. A silver flies 30-59 segment "points", which could really be anywhere from 15-infinite, depending on the fare class booked (assuming everyone qualifies by points, which I know is not valid). Also, I'd guess that many plats fly quite a bit more than is required to hit status, so their ratio is probably higher than 1.5 plat:gold.

Here are some real numbers.

Mrs SG and I will each fly 59 actual flights for 79 EQS's and just over 75k EQM'S (60056 BIS miles) this year for Platinum. Our average flight will be 1018 miles.

All of our travel is domestic and 16 of the flights are 500 mile minimums for 152 actual mile flights.

Our projected flying in 2009 is 20 trips EWR-IAH-MSY-IAH-EWR at 3830 EQM, 3134 BIS and 80 EQS totaling 76600 EQM, 62680 BIS and 80 EQS for Platinum.

We're probably not that atypical for domestic only Plats but certainly a different story than those who do EWR-Asia.

I don't think that you can derive any meaningful numbers from the limited data you have available.