Can't justify A-List Preferred ...
 

I'm A-List Preferred now. I can't justify spending the money necessary to get to the A-List Preferred tier for 2015. I don't think that the extra money I need to spend to get to ALP is redeemed by the 100% match on points.

I think I'll slum it next year as a mere A-Lister. Am I missing something? Has anybody done the spreadsheet?

I think that calculation depends on how many flights you take and how much they cost.

If earning either tier is achieved on points, it just got 7.5% harder.

I don't understand. A List Preferred is still 50/70K. The TQP's for flying have not changed, have they?

I will grant the bonus points have lost value but that does not change the difficulty achieving status.

You no longer earn points on the excise tax. It is now only earned on the base fare.

I'd wager that they never caught that perceived oversight (or let it ride) and used this opportunity to correct earning on the tax.

I wouldn't call is an oversight. After all, their advertised formula was (base fare + excise tax) * earning rate, and redemption was advertised similarly.

I forgot that. Thanks.

Did more digging.

http://www.southwest.com/assets/images/faqs/RR_FAQs.gif

So, which is it?

Found here.

Ink,

See this thread: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/south...stockpile.html

What was believed to be a glitch at first now appears to be a permanent change, reducing TQP's earned. The rest of the website hasn't caught up with the change that has clearly impacted by TQP's on flights that I took in the last 3 days.

I'm not trying to renew A+ this year after having qualified the last few years on points. Three main reasons:

1. AT fares have gotten prohibitively high for me for anything longer than 400 miles, which is forcing me to change my trip generation patterns back to pre-2009 approaches,
2. The Devolve seat is bad for anything more than 90 minutes. It used to be that I preferred the WN seat over the legacy seats due to nearly 33" of legroom and a better physical seat. Now I find either the DL or AA extra-leg room seats better. AA I get for free with status, DL I have to pay a surcharge at ticketing after March 1 as I didn't retain status with them. I'll still fly WN on longer redemptions while I have lots of points, but I am thinking more strategically about getting empty flights with the seat next to me open.
3. I still have enough points racked up that all of my domestic travel on WN is still points-redemption and thus not helping me requalify on segments.

So I'm probably going to make regular A-List on segments because there are still a lot of AA CR7 routes (such as ORD-IAH) and because I have a couple of clients where the lack of change fees is a necessity. But the days of being 95% WN are gone, it is now more like 35%.

Having given this some thought overnight I'll re-qualify my commit as- …a WN oversight of the long term impact of adding points for taxes.

You don't get any noticeable points booking super low fares like a $69 WGA without status. Those extra points from taxes eased the pain a little for those that book that low a fare and then see what they "got" in points return.

Yes. Not an oversight. My guess is it was setup that way originally because of operational/IT limitations; and was able to be addressed as a result of IT changes in conjunction with adding international bookings.

Don't forget to factor in the wifi that is free if you're A+ or $8 if you're not. Probably not a deal-breaker though.

Especially since many people report it don't work all that well anywway.

There it is.