Kacee

You are paying around $250 US in taxes on each RT LHR-SFO. I will be very surprised if your reduction in RDM under new system is less than 40% and it's more likely 45-50%.

Yes you are miscalculating. You can't look at percentages in the abstract, they don't tell you anything. You have to look at effect on mileage earnings at various fare levels. This has been posted ad nauseum here already, but to repeat, a premier (any level) who averages less than approx. 18 cpm will lose under the new system.

pigx5

Why would I care about the mileage earning if I have 12K to spend on that ticket? I will care more about the service and hard product which United can't give. The point is that if I have that money to spend on one ticket, I will give the money to other airlines to receive better service.

FlyerTom111

This change will backfire especially if AA comes out with awarding points or miles, whichever is greater.

morelegroom

You got what you paid for
you got the flexibility of a last minute fare

IAH-OIL-TRASH

I think you mean "This change will backfire only if AA comes out with awarding points or miles, whichever is greater." Wishing doesn't make it real.

Karl-MDW

They don't seem to want me either.

Yet (at least until they decide to further reduce Million Miler benefits), I will retain some status - if UA offers the best fare/deal.

In the past, I would only look for fares on United. Now, United has encouraged me to look for the best fare I can find at any airline. Plus, since every other airline offers perks for sale, now I can find the best priced fare at any airline and pick and choose if I want to pay for a better seat, etc. - not to mention that with my Delta AMX card I also get perks like one free bag.

Does anyone at United see that they are driving paying customers away?

adcer

Pretty huge bummer, no doubt about it. I'm not one of the business flyers on here, but nor am I really doing MRs for leisure. I'm in a long distance relationship and I spend hours each week to try and find the cheapest ways of getting from the east coast to the west coast, getting there as much as possible, maximizing my time with him, and not dying of discomfort in the process.

The best value proposition thus far has been United - for the last year I've been able to almost always find ~$300 RT from JFK or EWR to LAX or SNA - I go out after work Wed or Fri and I come back on a redeye Sun or Tues.

As a UA Gold, I currently earn a RT domestic saver award every 3-4 paid RTs - and by redeeming to see him, each trip essentially ended up averaging to ~$230 instead of $300. And the complimentary E+ meant the redeyes back weren't too too bad for a 6'2" guy.

PQD already was going to hurt a lot, because I'd probably hit Platinum by miles before I even hit Silver for dollars, but I was banking on the Chase waiver, which I'd hoped would get renewed for 2015.

This is just another slap. It will essentially increase my costs to see him by ~30%, and I'm already seriously straining my budget. And if the Chase waiver goes away in 2015, or they kill E+ for elites as has been speculated here, it will make what is already very hard, that much harder. Thanks United...

Not sure if I'll switch yet, but definitely looking at JetBlue which just gave me Mosaic with its fee-free changes, or Southwest which already had it.

Kacee

The people who are making the decisions are at this point focused pretty much exclusively on what Wall Street thinks, not the self-loading cargo.

LaserSailor

If status rules are unchanged for 2015 the Chase waiver up to Plat will still be in place, unless I've missed another change.

I'm flummoxed by the fact that people spend hard earned money to "be a 1k"
Or any other status on any airline for that matter. I just don't get that, given all the good or cool one can do with a 1000 bucks US.

Boghopper

As most know at the moment we 1Ks earn double miles on certain *A carriers. Is that going to stay? If so it give us a quandry about how to buy tickets. On UA stock we get the pqd, on *A stock we get a lot more miles in discounted fare classes.

I am "this" close to pulling the plug and going with AA. I'm SFO/OAK so the move of US Airways makes AA a lot more competitive in terms of routes. I'm just thinking they're going to do the same thing eventually, so maybe there's no point in making the switch.

I do think, though, that eventually all the carriers are going to have to go to a earnings based system. This is forced by the existence of the credit card/miles economy. Every year inflation makes everything cost more in dollars but the distance between places stays the same (except for some attempts by UA a couple of years ago to shorten distances), so to keep any sort of parity between flight earnings and CC earnings they either have to give less than a dollar/mile on cc spending (break the buck), more than a "mile"/mile on flying, or just give "miles" for spending on tickets. The last is the biggest change in some ways, but gives them lots more opportunities for manipulation in the future.

Kacee

Yes, we know, you're smarter and more practical than all the rest of us.

Personally, I value 6 GPU's alone quite a bit north of $1000.

Boghopper

I think the spending to get to 1K is for folks who are close anyway. For them (and that includes me) you're already on the plane a lot and the 1K status adds a lot to what you're already doing. You get double bonus on all that flying, you get much more upgrades (less than before, but still lots more than plats), you get SWUs.

It's a new world now with all the changes, so that calculus is going to change. I'm crunching numbers as we speak, waiting for the time when the AA match covers through next year.

bigmarley4

Adios United! Virgin (when possible) it is for this SFO flyer from here out.

Bear4Asian

^^^^^

GBman

I feel like a lab rat who's been handed the results.

Semi-consciously, I've been trying to out-last Smi/J.

It turned out that making the product much worse didn't cause me to leave. Shifting to a lot of regional jets didn't cause me to leave. Tremendous decline in reliability of service (cancelled flights, missing crew, etc.) didn't cause me to leave. A hugely demoralized workforce didn't cause me to leave. Improving competitors didn't cause me to leave. I was surprised, but for someone who has been 1K from the beginning of that status it turned out in the lab experiment that inertia is very powerful.

But now, the lab test results are in. Gutting Mileage Plus, the very basis of loyalty, has caused me to leave. Today we've planned out travel for second-half 2014, and instead of "always book UA", my instructions were explicitly, "book attractive carriers at good prices with convenient routes, and while we're at it let's eliminate a couple of trips". So, I won't be 1K in 2015 let alone 2016, I won't hit 3MM. Lifetime 1K as an award now sounds more like a life sentence. Lifetime United Club (which I was lucky enough to be granted in the past) turns out not to be enough of an incentive to fly the current UA.

So, Smi/J out-lasted me. The singular of data, an anecdote, is my lab-rat experiment. I'm beaten. I cannot understand this commoditization, giving up the loyalty-building Mileage Plus which allowed for value-plus pricing on top of a mediocre (at best) product with continual degradations. As far as I can tell, companies and industries which totally commoditize always ultimately turn out badly for management and for shareholders. That may be my misunderstanding; the other lab study underway, the future of Smi/J and UA, will test that proposition. I'll watch with interest from other carriers' seats.

If capitulation usually occurs just before a market crash bottoms, then maybe in the foreseeable future we'll be receiving 'we want you back' emails. But the nature of capitulation is this lab rat just doesn't care anymore.