Here’s the deal. Nobody but me knows anything about my travel patterns or when or why I travel. {N]obody else does either. I’m not simply switching because I don’t feel “valued.” AS has worked PERFECTLY for my travel thus far this year. It’s nice to try another airline, which is exactly what I’m doing. And other airlines where I’d usually bend my schedule to take UA. I’ll still fly UA, and I’ll easily make 1K. And frankly I’ll probably hit the GS challenge as well. As someone else said upthread, it’s been nice to break out of a comfort zone.

AS doesn’t offer even close to a competitive product to UA on Transcons, SFO-EWR/IAD. Widebodies with Polaris suites are no comparison to the 73M, let alone the frequency. AS has no invitation-only program and a limited network - I’d choose 1K on a Global airline over G75 on AS any day.

While it is fine to disagree on the issues, let's stay away from criticizing each other on their choices. It is their choice for their reasons. Fine to state your choices which may be different but it is not our role or of any value to the discussion to criticize others for their travel choices.

WineCountryUA
UA coModerator

Which is great! I’m making that exact same decision. I’ll easily get 1K on UA this year. And unfortunately the times I generally fly out of IAD it’s not on a widebody on UA. Nearly always a 73X or a 753. So, I’ll reiterate, it has worked well for me thus far. Will it always? Nope. But given that UA made it clear that my $75k doesn’t get GS, it frees up an extraordinary amount of spend such that I can be a free agent to a large extent and still get top published status on multiple airlines.

Your $75k? Or someone else's $75K that's already getting discounts? I think the actual source of the $75k is ambivalent. :)

Are you going for the $ 18'000 challenge since you are still showing GS 1M in your profile?

If I were in your shoes, I would spend the 18k to save $50-60k too. It's a win-win situation for you.

My comments were moreso directed at folks who can control their spend (not bound by UA corporate contracts) and have an opportunity to try different airlines due to loss of GS status; rather than blindly trying to get GS again. One poster even mentioned just giving UA 18k to get GS back.

I don't think most flyers are in your shoes were they can get 10's of thousands of dollars of free flights out of GS, or maybe they can??

As I posted upthread there’s no way I “deserve” GS this year w around 25k PQP after “freebies” but here we are with the challenge.

This year I redeemed 7 round trip XY tickets upgraded to PN with PP so conservatively at $3k each that’s still $21k. It’s a no-brainer for me since I’ll do just as many this year…and a $3k biz class trip to Europe (x4), South Africa (x2), or Australia (x1) is massively conservative by anyone’s valuation.

I might also be in the minority, but I suspect there are more of us who will get a great value out of this.

lol. Didn’t think about my profile. I’ll change it for you.

No corporate discounts here. Small partnership where we only book economy and anything upfront is out of pocket. So either way coming out of my pocket. A good amount of personal flying in there too.

So, are there any conclusions to be drawn from United’s GS selection this time? I know it’s all guesswork but do we feel PQD earned on corporate discount programs were disqualified or reduced? Did a CPM threshold (versus total spend) take precedence? We’ll never know but it’s interesting to try to reverse engineer these kind of things.

Next year
 

Now that the dust has settled, I'm thinking about why this happened. I understand the corporate spend thing- United has just said no more double dipping for GS status. But why irritate a huge swath of good customers tgat didn't make gs that are spending their own money? Like many, I'm a decade plus GSer that got dumped to 1k this year. I spent pretty much the same as the last 13 years, so I was surprised. Got the challenge, will make it back in. But why did United do this? After thinking it over, I think United is doing this in preparation for 1k carnage next year. They can't very well up the 1k reqs if they are handing out GS for only slightly more spend. They are pushing us all up the dollars spent ladder and we are being pushed up in preparation for a massive 1k jump next year. There are way too many 1k, check the gate lice- I can say that because as of Feb 1, I'm another louse. Been wrong before, but I say the 1k spend is 32k+ next year and gs is achieved at 60-70k+. You think the whining is bad now.....

Mostly agree with you, and I will be shocked if they don’t push up the requirements next year for one K. Entirely possible they are priming the pump with GS to be able to do that next year since they didn’t follow Delta this year.

however, I don’t think the whining will be as bad as you think. The reason Delta got impacted so badly is that there are probably hundreds of thousands of credit card holders who were impacted by the club policy. The number of 1K members will be impacted, of course, is significantly less. remember, to some degree FT and similar forums are echo chambers

I think another thing we might all be underestimating is the importance of Chase card spend for future 1K and GS qualification. It's clear that UA are aware of how much is at stake and want to close the gap between Amex Air (Delta) and AA. I'm convinced I got the nod for GS this year as a result of high card PQP (but I have zero evidence) along with my highest PQP overall and segment count.

Just some data points. My CPM was .75. That’s much higher than many people invited back to GS. So I think the corporate discount thing mattered more.
I keep reading people assuming that corporate discounts are exclusive contracts and the companies who negotiate them get to award GS status. That definitely was NOT true with my company.
I don’t think Chase card spend mattered that much either. At least not yet. My United spend was $130k. My Chase card spend was about the same. And I’m now a 1k.
Based solely on my data, I would say if you get a corporate discount with United, you will not be a GS. End of story. So if there is any conclusion based on what me and my coworkers experienced this year, it’s simply that if you purchase United tickets using a corporate discount, nothing else matters. You will not be a GS. Useful info if you work for a company that allows you to buy tickets on any airline. There is no incentive to spend more on United than what is required to achieve 1k. Much better to spread the spending around. Especially since American and Delta have not yet cut off their invitation only status to people like me. Yet….

based on the posts upthread, it seems pretty well established that the corporate discount is an automatic excluder, or at least nearly automatic excluder. I know some people have thought CPM matters in the past, but there has been no anecdotal correlation, like there was with total united metal spend. we keep throwing CPM out there, but it seems the weakest data point we have so far.