Actually, it can be. Before 3/3, I flew UA 75% of the time. Since 3/3, while UA is still my primary airline, I've reached Plat on AA, Silver on DL, and I will make Gold on DL by the end of the year. While I will reach 1K on UA this year, I've flown a lot of miles on AA and DL that would have ordinarily gone to UA, and my experience on AA and DL this year has made me realize that giving any one airline all my business is a fool's errand.

Really?
Ask them point blank and see what the response is. They have had plenty of opportunity to dispute the assertions here and haven't. That silence speaks volumes to me.

;)
 

I could not agree more with cyborg. I am fairly certain that United lost quite a few customers with this move...

Bad, baaaaaaad move guys!!!

By definition giving all your business to one airline would be a fools errand - you have no incentive to do so. If you are 1K on one airlinee, plat on another and gold on a third, there is absolutely no reason to be loyal to any airline. Your choice of airline should depend on schedule, services, price, conveniece etc. Because with that much travelling, even with no deliberate strategy you would still meet a senior elite status on two or more airlines. And reward travel cant be the reason either because you probably have hundreds of thousands of unused miles in those accounts.

Just after two good experiences with the 1k Line.
No matter how hard I look for reasons to stay with United, they just keep giving me reasons to leave--this change is unbelievably bad customer service.
So now, we will be taking up reservation agents time on the phone--dumb--dumb--dumb

What's the urgency driving this downgrade, with only hours notice, before the replacement is ready for even the preview site?

There's certainly room for improvement compared to listing raw fare buckets, but I won't hold my breath.

I think you correctly identified the meat of it. The "unintended use" was exposing how completely broken UA's waitlist clearing was and the savvy flyers were using third party services to alert when R/I/O were available and jump the waitlists.

Mine renewed on 9/7 and I promptly cancelled.

Nope, per notice on EF:
Today United Airlines has decided to remove award and upgrade class inventory from various channels, affecting ExpertFlyer. As such, United will be removed from the list of airlines in the Award & Upgrade search tool until further notice. In addition, all Active Flight Alerts for United award or upgrade class codes will be put into the Expired state. Should the award and upgrade data become available at a later date, we will again activate those Flight Alerts.

Any more details on the KVS fix and how durable it is?

I hate the interface and the lack of alerts, but EF has been neutered now.

a) You're not supposed to use instruments. They want you gone. That's the point. It's a transactional model. You pay for being in the front, or get lost. This is what they want.

b) Look at seat map and use EF.

c) You already know that. They are. It's a given. Hence, the obscurity they continue to create - making space for more.

Arrival times are gone - check the site now. They no longer tell you when they leave, when they arrive, or even where they are going. Now, there is just a PAY button to give them money.

For me, there have been no waitlist cleared upgrades since $mi$ek took over. Now it looks like the rest of you are going to start experiencing that, too. As far as I can tell, this is what has always been the plan, this is how it was on CO all along.

umm, how about whoever was responsible for the whole web infrastructure being on the fritz a few times in the last month?

So for people like me who select their travel based upon upgradeable space or award inventory, how the heck are we supposed to find out without calling in? The whole point of accessing the information via the web is to avoid having to spend countless hours on the phone on hold and taking up an agent's time.

Unless they have a way to address this, I don't see how anything they say can be considered an improvement or update that is to help the customer.

Let me add my 1K voice to the chorus here: this is an awful change, one that effectively declares war on their frequent travelers.

They're effectively encouraging me to:
- Fly less; and
- Use the call center more often when I do fly them.

Well, mission accomplished, I guess.

Sense the tone!

Two things:
1. As zrs70 says, people can still see upgrade availability. We just have to use an inferior, less expert, mechansim.
2. I'd guess that the call volume added because of this change will be less than the previous call volume associated with people calling in about why their CPU hasn't cleared despite R bucket availability. Also people calling in to manually get their upgrade to process before the sweep.

I think that flyers looking for mileage or instrument upgrade availability are not the intended targets here, but rather the folks who look at R and tie up the call centers asking why their CPU hasn't cleared.

Why do people do this? Google for "Why has my United upgrade not cleared" and you will see why. Also, due to the nature of the web and search engines, UA has no obvious solution around this other than to revamp the website and remove the visibility of the R bucket.

I agree wholeheartedly. TODs are a problem, but a separate problem. Let's not conflate them or we will be considered part of the paranoid fringe. I also think screen scraping by certain other website was also a secondary factor.

I'm actually pretty interested in finding out as well. I'd be happy to test it on the beta site ASAP!

With CO (prior to this "expert" mode fare buckets) I would call 1-2 times a day and check on any of my flights within the window for upgrades. That is how most of my upgrades processed. As a GS I will likely start doing so again (Recently I was only calling when I saw PN or R inventory open, and getting low). These are relatively quick phone calls though.

Particularly complex iteneraries used to sometimes literally take me 40 hours of phone time (over a couple of weeks) to get right. Recently I have self served, and taken ~1 hour of phone time for those complex itineraries. These are typically for vacation, where I usually buy 1 international C ticket & 1 reward. In the past I sometimes gave up and simply stayed home for a holiday.

The ease of searching from "expert mode" results in my spending around $5K in additional tickets for personal vacations. Not to mention that flying >300,000 miles per year I can divert $10K or so to another airline (out of spite) with no impact to me.

Given the current UA I would probably move >$30K of spend to another airline if I fell to 1K from GS (would still have enough to keep 1K on UA). If I do fall to 1K I'll also book >1 million miles of reward tickets before GS expires (for travel over the next year)

Its this (binary search for Y to C/F or for C to F):

Not an improvement to customer but to their revenue. The hope would be that you dont spend hours on the phone booking your travel in such calculated manner. If you chose that strategy then be sure they will put in the call centers people who dont understand you and you dont understand them who will argue with you that you never told them you were flying from new york (that it was JFK you said you were departing from). By the time you go through that twice then you will just buy whatever fare you find. They would hope that you just buy your ticket, dont get an upgrade, and they can sell those premium seats either as full purchase or as paid upgrades.