TA

Can someone explain on what grounds this would succeed?

Did UA guarantee some level of discount to the members? Did it promise that the benefits would not change?

I would like to know more about it. But it seems difficult to win a case if the complaint is that UA stopped providing the same level of discount that it never promised it would keep providing.

Maybe UA is weaseling out of it by maintaining the "club" but removing any substantive benefits of it. If it never promised to do so, then I suppose legally there's not much hope.

dgcpaphd

You are making a conjecture that is not correct.

Perhaps you should go back and read the threads on Silverwings. Your questions will be answered there. There is no need to reinvent the wheel by going over the same material here again.
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fly18725

Translation: I am a party to the lawsuit and realized its not a good idea to discuss the case in a public forum visited by the defendant.

dgcpaphd

Correction, I am not a plaintiff (party) to this lawsuit. Conjecturing is a dangerous pass time to practice. Most of the time conjecture is wrong, as it is in this instance.
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astroflyer

Just a curiosity. How much did members pay for the Silver Wings program annual/lifetime memberships? I'm just trying to get a sense of what was paid versus what was offered. No vested interests...far from qualifying for 55+ anything

mduell

$250 if I recall correctly from the other thread.

astroflyer

So it's a bit different from the people that paid AA $300K+ for lifetime first class travel. I'm not sure why UA doesn't just refund it and be done with it.

golfingboy

Actually, it is cheaper for AA to refund those customers than it is for UA to refund SilverWings Members... IIRC, the AA F pass still only has a handful of customers as opposed to the "presumed" 500K figure quoted here.

If it is indeed 500K, then that will set UA back $125,000,000. If there is only 250K, that is still $62,500,000.

astroflyer

Really? That many people signed up for this program? Those numbers seem shockingly high to me.

raehl311

Even at $125,000,000, if the case is successful, lawyers will get $40,000,000 cash, and plaintiffs will each get a $170 eCert.

golfingboy

I have no idea, but the OP is wrote as if s/he has it on good authority that the program had as many as 500K members at one point.

That is why I used the 500K figure in a speculative sense as we don't have any legit source with the 500K figure.

Something like that. Class Actions are cash grabs for lawyers, in the end it is the customers who are the losers no matter the verdict in a class action lawsuit. I work in Wealth Management and see class action settlement proceeds a billion times and clients only get $1-20 [despite having hundreds, sometimes thousands shares in the company]... Most notable ones are obviously Tyco, WorldCom, Enron, Bank of America, Lucent Technologies, etc.

dgcpaphd

UA does not currently release the number of lifetime members to the public.

However, UA did release the quantity way back in 1996 when UA was teaming with IBM in connection with encouraging seniors to fly UA. At that time, the number of members was 560,000 according to the below cited web address (the IBM article).

Subsequent to 1996, UA increased the number of members until 2005 when the program no longer allowed new lifetime memberships.

New members since 1996 paid UA a lifetime membership fee, as did the previous members.

Many members died since 1996. Therefore, taking the above facts into consideration, it is not possible to know the exact present number of members.

As confirmation of the 560,000 quantity of members cited above, go to the fourth line of the first paragraph of this article:

ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/softwa...s/ida0753f.pdf
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astroflyer

Your link doesn't work for me, but I'll take your word for it. Just shocked at the number of people who enrolled. It seems like a lot of money for not a lot of benefit. What a mess of a situation.

dgcpaphd

I just tried the link again. It opens to the IBM and Silverwings article.

Maybe you will find the article interesting if you try again to open it.

The Internet is sometimes inconsistent. You might try Mozilla as well as Internet Explorer to open the link.

While reading the article, you will take a trip back in time (via the article) to 1996. You will get a glance of how IBM and UA put together an interesting marketing tool.

IBM kept its part of the offer but UA let the program go into default despite keeping members lifetime membership fee and still advertising the program on united.com (intermittently).

UA's behavior over keeping the fees and not honoring the commitment is not the only instance of how UA currently breaches agreements.
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astroflyer

It worked the second time. Maybe it was the FTP server that was tripping the browser up.

You're right...it is a walk back in time. One thing that really stands out is they offered 25,000 bonus miles just for visiting a web page. Wow!