Time will tell
 

Seems like the go forward plan is to give United 4 Polaris round trips a year and nothing else.

it’s easy to do I can book whatever I want

if you’re going to punish me for flying domestic ok I won’t fly domestic

YTJK

GS Benefits 2024
 

Given how things have gone these past few years with GS benefits significantly eroded is it possible that UA has heard all the negative feedback and is going to bring back some of the benefits e.g., Companion upgrades on RT vs. One flight upgrades, Prioritizing GS upgrades over same day $99 upgrade offers etc?

Don’t think so
 

Doubt it IF flights remain as full as they are and have been for two years. Under that scenario united is better off with more GS and less benefits inherently anyway for GS’ers who continue to do all their spending on United because of loyalty and perceived desirability of GS exclusivity. Overall I feel as if what happened today is poor overall business and marketing strategy from United. Many GS’ers have staff, family etc in their spending orbit and every GS loss is someone who not only curbs some spending on United going fwd but probably for those in their orbit too. POOR from United!

More details are becoming apparent. I work for a very large global company. For travel, we can use any airline we choose on any trip. We can book flights using our travel office or directly from the airline. All tickets booked through the travel office are 016. By company policy, they have to be refundable. While usually discounted, we aren’t part of some mass GS or status program, and it is often possible to get cheaper rates directly from United. No employee (of several thousand frequent travelers) was granted Global Services status this year regardless of how much PQP they accumulated in 2023. That’s a dramatic change from previous years. The average PQP generated by a fairly large sample of previous GS members was almost $80k. Some double that. All failed to be given an invitation to GS in 2024. That represents several millions of dollars of flying on United from customers who have complete freedom to choose any airline they want to fly on.
While the reduction in GS flyers this policy change generates, might be good news to remaining GS flyers, keep in mind, the policy was revealed at the end of the year after people like me (long term GS members) spent $130k on United travel. Had I known I wasn’t eligible for Global Service status moving forward, I obviously would have shifted my travel to another airline. Loyalty is a two way street. If United retains this new policy, it creates a precedent of dramatically shifting its frequent flyer qualifications without any warning and after it’s too late for customers to decide how they want to handle the changes. Obviously they are free to run their programs in any way they want. It’s a free market. But as 2024 starts, you have to wonder what changes to the GS program they’ll decide to reveal January 2025.

So what's the theory here? No one who flies (exclusively? primarily?) on "discounted" tickets (even if, as you say, you can often find cheaper flights on UA.com than your company's "discount") is eligible no matter the spend? That's wild if true.

Also, would be interesting to hear if any of the other very high but non-qualifying PQPs upthread are also traveling on company discounts. Would certainly lessen the mystery.

That is interesting news. I actually joined GS when I was part of a corporate program. However I left that company three years ago and am now running a different company. We don’t have a corporate travel program. My assistant and I make all of my travel directly using fares quoted on the website just like any other normal traveler. I was frustrated at not being renewed with $70k PQP on United metal, but seeing some of the others with even higher numbers not get renewed made me scratch my head even more. My wife thinks that because I didn’t give them glowing reviews all of the time (I believe in being honest with them when their service is terrible) that I got put on the non-renewal list.

When you left your old company and went to the new one, did you maintain GS? What was your PQF number on the $70K total? While I think UA is many things, I dont believe in conspiracy theories where they would flag your account for non renewal just because of feedback. From a practicality perspective, its too subjective, and how would they even manage it effectively based on a database that size?

If spend it what their going for, it makes no sense to me to not renew multi year GS members like yourself. You are the best brand ambassadors the airline has.

In terms of being newsworthy, this action by United is a better story than what Delta did. At least in the case of Delta, there was a rational explanation of why the change occurred: the issue was that they went too far too fast. For United what they’re doing is just plane dumb.

We’ll first see the bloggers and vloggers jump all over this story, then the mainstream media.

On behalf of all those who spent a ton and didn’t make it, I really really hope you’re right!

Respectfully, both of these sound like agents "making crap up on the fly." There's already plenty of reports on this thread about people requesting reviews and UA are working on them (allegedly). Automatic or not, people are being fed a lot of lines of crap by GS agents because 1) they don't know any better; 2) they aren't part of the qualification proceedings; 3) they are definitely not part of the communications path.

No doubt some accounts will be reviewed and I would expect especially those with $80K+ spend to re-qualify. But it seems UA has so far made the determination that they will not. A back track may be coming but some mass back track I don't expect.

-RM

I’m part of a big organization with extremely high spend. 100% of paid travel booked via corporate rates on an online booking tool. I book stuff late, (a lot of mid-con J travel to east coast, fully refundable) but I often get C or Z fares.

I don’t think this is about CPM or $/segment. My guess is that they made some other synthetic benchmark about growth of spend and market-based competitiveness. I’m in Denver and did MOST of my segments up front on 737s on UA exclusive routes, so where am I going to go? I had 3 TATL trips, one work trip DEN-LHR, booked in Economy and upgraded with PP, one personal DEN-IAD-GVA booked YN with PP, one DEN-FRA booked in Business.

My guess is if you’re flying competitive routes, you move up in consideration. I’d be curious to hear where travelers went and what options were, especially for those who were denied.

Denver is Very captive, domestic focused market for UA and that’s easy to retain. There LH MUC/FRA, BA and AF seasonal but none put their best products in the market for long haul and only to 3 cities year round (CDG is seasonal). If you’re grinding out domestic F trips to ATL, DFW, and ORD on UA metal every week, I bet they try harder than if you’re like me headed to United hubs and secondary cities with the only Direct routes.

SFO they fight for TPAC with Asian airlines who may have better products (SQ, KE, JAL, ANA, Starlux, China Airlines, EVA, Air China, etc).

EWR is also competitive with JFK potentially a train ride away and every option under the sun. Again I think they look if you’re flying competitive routes (e.g., LHR) where they’d work to keep you.

Now the decision to trim the ranks is something else and I also think intention but the sense checks on the invites probably missed the mark. These are extreme cases, if an individual ever spends more than $100k at your business, you give them consideration. It’s an enormous amount of money and more importantly TIME spent interacting with your business and front lines.

I’d say that they could have communicated that something was coming with a “we are working on even more exclusive benefits for our GS customers” but there were multiple emails and communications about “we are maintaining our status qualification levels” (and implied “unlike those turkeys in Atlanta”).

I think people are jumping to conclusions based on one data point. The corporate discount theory might be right, but maybe that also explains the potential glitch? Time will tell.

I would bet that this new GS population is almost certainly a feature not a bug. Why would Kirby fight folks on eroding benefits etc if you can just redesign the program to qualify people who don’t need, care about, or use the benefits? That seems to be precisely what has happened. He must have significant confidence that they can fill any premium seats vacated by folks who walk away, or that fewer will walk away over time.

Yes, I don’t think my particular data point is the whole answer. It’s just one company, albeit a large one. But it remains true that everyone I work with got the same treatment. One has started collecting info and has almost 100 responses from people who were GS, flew as much or more on United in 2023, and are no longer GS in 2024. He has no responses from anyone invited back. So at least at my company, United simply cut everyone from the company. We are global, meaning we travel to every continent but Antarctica. We also have a lot of employees who travel only in the US. None survived the cut. So theories regarding CPM (mine was .73), primary airports, how you spent your plus points or frequent flyer miles etc., seem to have no bearing on why me and my coworkers are no longer GS. The common denominator is who we work for.

The current 1K will be pleased to welcome all these newly granted 1K 😂 Not thining the herd !