It had to be in the works for a while, so yes.

A lot of people over at the AS subforum complain that the AS motto is "we suck just a little bit less than the other guys" as if that's a bad thing. It's a fact of air travel that lots of people book entirely on price, some people are price insensitive, and there are people who are price sensitive but will pay more for less suckage. AS seems to go for that market, and they've been pretty good about it the past few years. People who've been flying AS for years get angry, but moving there from UA for domestic flights has been a major improvement. There aren't any lie-flats, but the seats are comfortable, the food is ok, and I get the E+ equivalent upgrade earlier and with greater certainty.

Does that 10% include the value of some points in a *A mileage program?

I'm coming to see the costs of loyalty thanks to United's latest status devaluation. But I'm not sure I want to close all my frequent flier accounts. Why not collect miles/points AND shop around for the best value on those front cabin flights?

I actually don't even care about the points anymore, as they don't buy anything for me at least. I was a points/miles whore for decades, but now I no longer see any reason to bother with it. Money is money, and all the points don't seem to go very far at all anymore.

$750 in brand new business class from Gatwick through Lisbon to JFK on TAP. It was literally $7200 for the same itinerary on United on the same dates. The points just don't have enough value for me to bother.

I'm not though, as you point out, closing my FF accounts. Have tons of miles still in AA, UA and Jetblue, and do use the miles when airfares are bonkers high for no apparent reason. I plan on using Chase Rewards to transfer into the airline that has the best reward seat cost at the time I need a seat, should the cost be nuts. Case in point, $800 to fly from EWR to DTW for a weekend to visit our last remaining college kid, as opposed to 60K miles worth of points. That flight should have cost $160 per person, which is what we've been paying for years, but UA in EWR is simply killing us northern NJ folk with predatory pricing.

It seems like OZ is emerging as the most attractive alternative for *G status. So I think it makes sense to include them as a special case in the list.

Based on the aggregated replies so far, could we have the following poll?



Will you switch frequent flyer programs / what will you switch to?
[ ] stay with UA
[ ] join UA
[ ] change to American Airlines
[ ] change to Delta Air Lines
[ ] change to Alaska Airlines
[ ] change to Asiana Airlines
[ ] change to non-US Star Alliance (please post which program)
[ ] change to non-US Oneworld (please post which program)
[ ] change to non-US SkyTeam (please post which program)
[ ] split alliances / programs (please post which programs)
[ ] cease preference for any program
[ ] retain no preference for any program

System limitation a max of 10 choices

Sorry, wasn't in counting mode.

Propose:

Will you switch frequent flyer programs / what will you switch to?
[ ] stay with UA (or join UA - please post)
[ ] change to American Airlines
[ ] change to Delta Air Lines
[ ] change to Alaska Airlines
[ ] change to non-US Star Alliance (please post which program)
[ ] change to non-US Oneworld (please post which program)
[ ] change to non-US SkyTeam (please post which program)
[ ] split alliances / programs (please post which programs)
[ ] cease preference for any program
[ ] retain no preference for any program

My strategy (Lifetime Gold, near a very early retirement):

1 - stay with UA for work trips as SDC is valuable and UA is our preferred carrier
2 - for personal trips paying $, stay with UA and Star Alliance - *G is better than nothing
3 - for personal casual trips using awards that require flexibility - WN and BA Avios on AA
4 - for personal casual trips that are pretty firm - depending on how many miles UA wants for the trip

Thanks! ^

For all the folks saying become free agents - easy to say if you can afford to pay up to fly in J or domestic F all the time. For me, I am pretty insensitive to flying in Y unless it's a TCON (which is a minority of my domestic travel) - so status does matter if things go south. I have not flown paid J on a non-United flight ever - so I have no idea if the service I get if things don't work out properly matches what I know to be good service on UA. My work travel (all domestic) has to be in Y. In short - I will stick with the devil I know instead of trying things out too adventurously. I had an STL-IAH-MEM flight that I had to change on short notice earlier this year because of weather in Houston. If I play the 'free agent' game, I would probably end up getting screwed no matter what if the weather was bad in DFW (on AA) or ATL (on DL). It helped that not only could I fly UA, but they routed me on my preferred timing - which was via DEN, which, geographically, would probably have been a nonstarter for a kettle.

Just my thoughts. If I can do the calculations far enough ahead of time, I might try to fly MINT on TCONs more, even though I despise the trek out to JFK. For the one or two intra-West Coast flights I have, maybe I try out AS if a) it avoids transiting via SFO or LAX (unlikely, since those are the main cities I visit out there), or b) if I don't have to pay through the nose for baggage fees (with a newborn, I need to start thinking about this when it comes to checked baggage fees). Otherwise...yes, I hate the changes, but I will stick with it.

For the purposes of the poll—I’m leaning towards OZ or potentially A3, with the idea that I’d cut paid travel quite a lot (much of it was just to keep status), and do more reward travel after easily renewing *G.

I kind of have a similar plan. I will become a free agent for a while as I burn off my UA miles on partner flights, hopefully before they devalue that chart too, and enjoy the likes of HA and WN domestically. Then if I do jump back into the game, I intend to do it with OZ. Looks like a couple trips every 2 years in paid NH or BR or CA PE or J cabin would be sufficient to renew it, thus allowing me to keep all of my domestic travel on HA and WN, which I think are better than UA anyway. And should be very easy for me to manage this without ever losing a weekend to a mileage run.

I will probably abstain from the poll - I am jumping ship to DL, but primarily because I moved to a DL hub and the huge hike in qualification requirements is just a last kick to stamp out my regrets :)

Non-status paid F is arguably worse than non-status paid Y when it comes to IRROPS because you get almost no benefits (nothing on the phone) for your cabin class, and there are plenty more worse places to get rebooked (i.e. not in the premium cabin) which happen far too often. The biggest saving grace is that at least the lowest status tier of a program usually provides a night-and-day difference to basic customer service on the phone.

From MSP, it should be easy to get lots of UA segments, at least four for almost all RTs.

I really don't have the time to make extraneous connections on domestic itineraries, and DL tends to be cheaper than UA to much of the western US anyway. On top of that, UA likes to use married inventory blocks to protect high-dollar ORD revenue.. good luck flying MSP-SFO on UA using anything other than the spotty and inconsistent schedule of nonstops!

I need UA for domestic out of Maui (primary destinations LAS, IAH, ORD, EWR), where I'll get my 54 flight count. My two int'l trips/year are most likely to be on (non-016) preferred partner airlines. Add the PQP from cc spend, I'll probably easily make new 1K requirement for 2021,