Over $60k PQP on United metal ($68k total) and not invited. Half of the segments on over water itineraries, probably 80% of the spend. Not through a corporate program and all booked on UA.com, some of which even on UA branded CC. After reading through this thread, I think the hub-captivity might be more relevant than I expected. I'm DEN based, so UA knows my choices are limited. If this is the path UA chooses, I will try and cap my spend at 1K and shift everything else to LH for TATL and BR for TPAC (once I get to SFO).

Maybe they'll review and apply the $75k funding now needed for a GS nomination w/ PassPlus to the corporate OPM flyers. It's a benchmark in place internally and GS customers can't really complain that some goal post has been moved (UA never reveals the GS qualifying standards). The notional "$50k" benchmark has been around for a decade at least - maybe time to jack it up in line w/ the new PassPluss hurdle?

it would be supremely dumb for United to move to some sort of system whereby they allow their big corporate customers to pool ALL of their nominated employees and decide for themselves who gets GS.

Not to mention not communicating this in advance.

So that’s probably what happened.

Corporate Travel Officer: "Hey we are going to sign a contract with an airline for all our airline needs for the next 12 months"
UA Corporate Sales: "Cool, how much do you have to spend"?
Corporate Travel Officer: "Probably $50M or so split down the middle domestic and international, we're a big company. What can you do for me"?
UA Corporate Sales: "I can get you 5% off all domestic and 3% off all international annually. That's $1,25000 and $750,00 savings respectively".
Corporate Travel Officer: "Sounds great. Anything else that you can do for us"?
UA Corporate Sales: "As your company is based at one of our hubs, I can throw in some other stuff here and there. How about your Exec's get our top tier status, Club access,etc"?

Contract signed and money committed.

Playing that out, what does UA have to lose by culling a bunch of GS from corporate contracts? If the people that are doing the flying don't have a say in the contract, why would UA care? Trying to think like Kirby on this one and come up with an explanation of why it seems the corp contract GS are the ones getting cut.

That’s usually the entry I see for a retail return that had MileagplusX extra points.

I mentioned it upthread, but the Corporate Travel Manager at a major consulting firm I talked with again explained that. Their contract rebate discounts are nicely increased for 2024, along with the size of the amenity pool. She believes they are putting the control back there and letting corporates decide who gets GS assigned and cracking down on “double dipping” to boost profitability overall for these accounts. Apparently they evaluated an alternate approach where all accrued miles come back to a central account for the company to use on free tickets, but decided that would be even more wildly unpopular than upsetting a handful of employees with GS.

Overall, against the backdrop of the PassPlus overhaul, seems to be where the focus is going. That could mean a sizeably smaller GS pool for this year.

It's company money being spent, not the OPM travelers'. A lot of "I spent 100k on United" is actually "My company spent 100k on United". Maybe United thinks OPM GS travelers were getting too much in the way of benefits relative to their actual "skin" in the Premier game. An argument can be made that some GS customers are going to be lost, but are lot are hub captives and/or corporate contracts favoring UA. I really do think UA has taken a hard look at what all the OPM GS travelers are costing them and has decided they're going to make more money with this path. They're still getting 1K on OPM, so pretty good leverage.

As a decade-long 1K, I'd like to remind all the newcomer 1Ks to leave space in the pre-board area for families w/ strollers to get through to the podium for boarding. And maybe 1Ks ought to boarded by tenure at that status level :)

Im thinking you’ve hit the nail on the head. I checked with a few former colleagues who had 60-70k UA metal and they also didn’t get renewed for the first time in many years. I know we had a very generous corporate contract (not just a few percent off but intl negotiated fares that were terrific compared to .bomb) so that would jive…

Now UA, please just confirm I’m getting a challenge. Haha

Spot on. They’ve also done the math on PassPlus and realized people can book non-UA metal, bring others along, and the net spend of the individual at $50k is likely way below that.

I’m curious if corporates with contract big discounts / rebates using a third party booking agency are singled out here - for example, if you use PassPlus corporate, which UA considers a direct booking channel, are those qualifiers still “in”? Perhaps.

I guess there's still the issue of the corporate travel people controlling who gets status. I can see Mr. Big Shot, V.P. of Nebulous Job, w/ 4 trips a year getting GS status over 12 TATL/year mid-level worker. I think new, higher ($75k ?) OPM hurdle wouldn't be too bad a thing.

If it's true that the corporate contact managers are going to choose who gets status for the most part going forward, then it's confusing that seemingly a number of people were also told that any non-renewed GS can get a challenge at a $54k annualized rate, after having spent much more than that last year in many cases. That just seems like a way of annoying customers for no particular benefit.

It could be the frontline agents are still living in the old world and not sure any of the "i will forward your challenge" request have actually resulted in a challenge.

I mentioned this potential change a while back but UA and the employer travel departments should have been communication this before we got here.
Plus there have been some that claim they don't have these discount programs, but were not renewed.
And then there are those with discount programs but multi-choice of carriers, how is UA going to keep those travelers (better route coverage)?

Still a lot of issue and really poor change management. I have a couple of change management books from 25-30 years I am willing to loan UA. (for a few PlusPoints:D)

Interestingly, the "UA Spend" ($69,090) in my GS Welcome Video (I was notified in early December) was within $50 of my running total flying PQD - even though included in that total was $5000 on ANA & Lufthansa Group connections to/from UA over-water flights. Maybe "United Metal" isn't as important a parameter as we think.

Or the welcome video metric doesn't disambiguate to avoid confusion ("why does the welcome video say X but the website says Y?")

We haven’t seen any official challenge come out yet. You would think that a blanket challenge would be automatically offered at the same time the “Welcome to 1K” note was displayed to avoid frustration and alienation of the customer.

What could be happening now is the data wheels calculating who is a non-Corporate discount GS member to extend the challenge to.

Mine was on the nose, less any other *A tickets including mixed itineraries (of which I had many)

my prediction is that challenges will be limited, if it’s true they demoted a bunch of GS who have well north of that annualized. I think agents are wishful thinking and really just want to get irate customers off the phone. Once UA straightens out its messaging it will be easy to make the corp travel departments the bad guys who are taking the money and bogarting the amenities.