Miles For Upgrades
 

I was talking to a guy in the past few weeks and he was telling me that some of the major carriers, AA, UA, etc. are going to only allow miles for upgrades if your a premium member as there are so many ways to earn miles now that the upper tier flyers are not able to upgrade.

Has anyone heard that? It makes no difference to me as I'm Exec Plat with AA and get free upgrades and rarely do not get an upgrade.

Just curious!

I seriously doubt that. Elites generally have other ways to upgrade - if the airlines wanted to make a change, maybe they could reprioritize so mileage upgrades don't get confirmed as early, but it would still be a ridiculous devaluation of the entire program to eliminate them for non-elites. It's in the airlines' best interests to allow low-level members to upgrade occasionally - once they get a taste of it, they may want to become elite to have more opportunities.

Very unlikely. The airlines need to keep those $ coming in for the miles that they sell to credit card companies, etc.

What they might do is restrict the availability of mileage-based upgrades for non-elites, but they'd have to rejigger their systems quite a bit to make that happen

I can't imagine it would offer much advantage to the airlines. Many of the "upgradeable with miles" fares are higher, sometimes substantially so, than the base fare. The airlines get more money and carry less miles on their books, the customer gets a taste of the F experience which may (or may not) make him fly more miles on the airline.