MrOCTeckels

Earnings (PQM, RDM) are segment by segment.

I'd be very surprised if you had a P fare married to a Y fare... probably more like P+L.

sapguy

I like this change, a lot! This will work great for me in 2016.

While my employer & clients only pay for Coach, what I will do is to call UA to pay up to P fare or discount F fare as soon as the ticket has been issued.

I fly a lot PHL-West Coast on the first morning flight so if discounted F is reasonable (which it has been recently) then I will just pay up the difference and I don't have to worry about CPU & RPU, and I get 200% PQMs, not bad at all. I get my F seat to either sleep some more or get work done.

For TATL and TPAC, I will do P fare from here on out and will save the GPUs for my family. That 200% will allow me to requalify for 1K fairly quickly in 2016 so that I will have more flexibility as I labored to get PQMs this year while my PQD were above $15K.

Since I will be 2MM at the end of 2015, I will now look for fly more on 'interesting' upstart airlines domestically like JetBlue and Virgin, and on LH, NH and SQ overseas.

Good move, UA.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

Had to travel to Suriname (probably even fewer FTers have been there) half a dozen times for business, so the routing was IAH-POS-PBM, the latter segment on Caribbean.

exerda

I've posted it several times as I had had a waitlisted GPU there for months until I more recently upfared to P and had a heck of a time getting UA IT to actually process the upfare.

I love the subsequent post about Suriname, though.


I frequently have itins which are P + Y. If I request a trip be fared in F or C, and some segments in the trip don't offer a F cabin, they almost always price out in full Y (e.g. IAD-DEN-GJT in paid F is A-Y-Y-A for the segments; I've had Z-Y-Y-C once this year, and various other combinations of paid front cabin + full Y).

To answer the prior poster, though, and agree with yours about how they post, they post by segment, so P will get 200%, and Y will get 150%. I wish they would just go ahead and sell P straight through, even when there's no front cabin, for posting purposes and ease of changes if they swap in a 2-cabin a/c at some point.

I've had the problem of paid F on a trip where they downgauged a segment to a CRJ, and that segment went to Y, then they upgauged it to a CR7, and I had to call and get them to reticket to get it to go back to F for that segment--it wasn't automatic.

Hipplewm

I quite frequently get Y and P

Buy a FC ticket and if one segment doesn't have a multi cabin aircraft, you always get booked Y

jjmoore

More than 60% of my 2015 travel was in A, C, D, Z, P. This will be a nice boost to my PQM. Looking forward to having 200K+ PQM and having more RPU's and GPU's. My better half loves those certificates.

Not to mention, I will have more than 35,000PQM in January because of these changes... would have been more like 25,000 under last year's PQM structure.

I wonder if people will start to do PQM runs more now because of this... booking a direct flight in F (especially one of those discount F fares like I had from SFO-ORD a few months ago for $500), and doing SDC to add segments and, hence, far more PQM's.

exerda

Not quite "always," but 99% of the time IME. I had a couple I had booked (but ended up not flying) where it must have priced end-on-end or something, and the Y-only segment was in V or W.


Similar boat for me. The great thing is that more and more of the places I've taken a RJ in full Y are going to 2-class RJs and thus reducing the number of Y segments. I kind of hope UA keeps up their current pricing model for the front cabin. So far, I only have 1 segment booked for 2016 that was booked in economy (it's been upgraded, FWIW).


SHHHHHH!

jjmoore

Yes and no ... those people still have to spend the $12K to get 1K ... Personally, I would like to see that number increased to more like $18K ... I think that would balance out this PQM thing more effectively, and force people to spend the $$ to get the top status.

This new PQM system makes more sense to reward people like my better half, who barely made gold on more than $17,000 spend this year (and in 2014 likewise). She had a lot of premium cabin fares... and based on my calcs, she will easily be platinum in 2016 on an equal year.

I will requalify for 1K much faster next year, but I will also say that I have even more incentive now to buy up beyond simply getting more RDM's... now I will arrive at additional RPU/GPU certificates more quickly too.

Already have more than 10K PQM booked for Jan, which would otherwise have been more like 5-7K. With my int'l and 2 additional weeks of travel, I will be well into the 35K PQM range, whereas in 2015 would have been more like 25K PQM.

I give a ^ to this change... though I would prefer to see the PQD requirements go to more like $5K for Silver, $10K for Gold, $15K for Platinum, and $20K for 1K.

exerda

UA will have to improve benefits significantly before they could hike the PQD requirements that steeply.

LaserSailor

Nope. 99.9 % of the world travel for need, not plastic status. They could raise these limits easily without changing revenue. They just need DL to it first.

20k is probably the right limit to get rid of those acquiring status to leverage miles use. If you have 20 k discretionary spend annually, you don't play the MR game anyhow.

JetAway

How could that possibly benefit you? Fewer 1Ks isn't going to mean more upgrades since UA and the other carriers are bent on monetizing premium travel, not giving it away. Free award changes? Doesn't matter how many 1Ks there are. Shorter Group 1 boarding? Maybe an extra 4 minutes. Pride of place, as in "Look how much I spend with UA." Maybe.

wco81

He probably doesn't buy his tickets, his employer does.

jjmoore

FWIW I invested more than enough of my own money to make 1K without any of my employer's contribution.

I am not saying that less 1K's would make upgrading easier... it would make 1K and other status levels more elusive by raising the PQD bar. This would certainly be more acceptable if the perks were a bit more exclusive too.

aCavalierInCoach

Ohhh, so the spend he directs should be worth less to United. Got it.

Hipplewm

Personally, I think this change is more to entice more people like me to swap from Delta. The 100K vs 125K XQM limit was one reason i swapped, I fly enough to get 100K, but not enough for 125K, mileage runs are hard because i am on call 24/7/365 except 2 weeks vacation. I would have a hard time explaining to my boss why I can't be at XXX in 8 hours.

My spend the past few years on Delta has always been been 25K and up, but never higher than Platinum.

It comes down to chicken/egg....Who has more value?

Someone who flys 125K EQM per year and spends 12,000 PQD or someone who flies 75K EQM and spends 25,000 PQD?

The second person int hat equation will feel slighted though as they spend twice as much money, but get less benefits. This formula will help equal that out IMHO

/puts soapbox away