My guess is that the upgrade list will become an Ebay style auction with priority in order of highest to lowest bidder. Bidding ends 20 minutes prior to departure with no status required.

hmmm.... that actually sounds kinda fair!
Very revenue driven!

I like this idea.

I had a chance to discuss this option with Larry Kellner at one of the DO's. His main concern was the potential loss of/access to customer information.

Of course, Larry is now gone, so who knows.......

I too like this idea. In fact, I would do it as a silent auction. Every passenger can enter a maximum dollar amount he/she is willing to pay for an upgrade. Nobody knows what anyone else is bidding. The highest bidder(s) get the upgrades.

That's basically what NZ does with their "one up" upgrades.

Prior to do that, I would say they want to change into a system of awarding upgrade points which then can be used for this bidding. If they use regular miles for this purpose (and don't award more), that devalues the benefit.

So, maybe someone should get the biddingforupgrade.com domain name if it is not already taken :D

Etihad does this and people I know who travel them like this aspect of their program.

They'd lose a lot of the loyalty they have with FFs with this kind of system.

But they're already losing that loyalty by pulling the upgrade rug out from under Premiers. I'm merely suggesting a paid-upgrade scheme that works better (IMHO) than what UA is using now. Highest bidder wins.

Does no announcements on MileagePlus program mean nothing has changed?
 

I thought we would have heard something by now. I'm hoping no news is good news in that all entitlements and award levels stay the same?

I was expecting something by year end.

No news is always good news but this new team does not seem to care about advance notice so all we can do is hope

Chances are any mileage awards that go up we will get advance notice. But things like requiring us to pay fuel surcharges on tkts can come any day w little or no notice

I would suspect that the changes & realignment in the C-suite have something to do with it. It's just speculation on my part, but I'm getting a vibe that someone woke up and figured out that a) the marketing message sucks; and b) (most) high-value flyers are profitable! Losing them to the competition is a bad thing... And I'd bet that those who were just asked to leave put a much smaller value on FF's than the numbers showed we're worth.

Granted, a small, small percentage of Elites took advantage of the AA offer and switched their flying, but I'd bet that was a disproportionate amount of margin that shifted with them.

Just guesses on my part, but I think any changes we see will be designed to attract and retain - that's after all the entire point of FF programs. Probably wasn't going to be that way, but those with that sort of thinking just got walked out.

Call me a glass-half-full kind of guy. ;)

I've had similar thoughts. However, it may not be because they are going to make a lot of changes. It may just be that they are giving the new folks enough time to at least think about it. My guess is the personnel change happened too late for any really big changes in the program this year.

I think United is waiting to see what AA does post-Bankruptcy. Do they merge or go it alone. I think they may institute changes to grab elites from AA if they decide to merge.

AA CEO announced he plans on going it alone - and I think they can pull it off, but will need to continue with the aggressive harvesting of high-value customers...of course once their glass is full, we all know what happens to those goodies :rolleyes:

This is a relief as it will keep our Appalachian Bumpkin cousin (USAir) in *A as a domestic backup for accrual and redemption.

I can't tell either way if the exec shakeup is a case of "you angered our high value customers and they left" or possibly "you didn't squeeze enough revenue out of *all* our customers and keep pandering to those annoying Elite SOBs".

Only time will tell....but an independent AA will at least provide an emergency escape hatch if my second thought turns out accurate.