United Airlines announced yesterday that they were revising their upgrade program within Mileage Plus. The headline is going to sound great — “unlimited” upgrades — but the reality is that this downgrades the United program (further). It’s a downgrade of the upgrade.
What United is doing is eliminating the 500-mile electronic certificates and the regional-upgrades. (International systemwide upgrade certificates for 1K travelers are unchanged. Upgrades booked with miles, which will soon carry a cash copayment, are otherwise unaffected by these changes.)
Instead, all travelers with any elite status will be automatically eligible for an upgrade. Some implications for the changes:
- If you’re an entry-level elite (Premier) you’re not going to upgrade much. Previously, a Premier Executive or 1K would have to request an upgrade and offer up some certificates, but now those elites will automatically jump ahead of the Premiers. If you live in a city with a lot of United elites (Chicago, San Francisco, DC, Denver, for starters…) and you’re “just” a Premier, say adios to hot nuts.
- If you’re a 1K flier, you’re in good shape for shorter flights where you might not have otherwise bothered cashing in your upgrade currency. You’ll be at the top of the list for those short hops from Washington to Providence. Par-tay!
- But… 1Ks give up some security. The e-certificates that allowed upper-level elites to reserve upgrades at booking are kaputt. Adios, sure thing!
- Flights on “p.s.” service between New York/JFK and LAX or SFO are excluded from the “unlimited” upgrades. This is obnoxious — you’ll have to use miles or systemwide upgrade certs to move from economy to first? Puh-leeeze.
Within minutes of the announcement, Gary Leff and lucky each weighed in on the change. Neither of them found it to be an improvement. Read ‘em both for more critique.
Reader mail also started pouring in. And none were happy. A few excerpts:
Don writes:
“Unlimited”? My a**. I’m a Premier living in Chicago and flying mostly short hops. I guess I’ll be in Economy Plus forever. Hello American?
Taylor writes:
So they take away my confirmed-regional upgrades and make it a lottery? How is this an improvement?
Antonio writes:
This is genius marketing on United’s behalf, because on the surface it sounds like a fantastic proposition. UNLIMITED UPGRADES!!! But in reality, what they’re doing is cutting a program that gave upgrades earlier, allowing the airline more time to keep those seats free to possibly sell them to a paying customer.
SA nails the reason for making the change:
So Continental joins Star Alliance, and United is turning Mileage Plus into OnePass. At least there’s consistency across the North American partners.
And Tino sums it up:
So United wants to encourage gambling, instead of rewarding loyalty. Maybe their call center should merge with the 1-800-GAMBLER helpline.
In the end, Antonio’s objections noted, top-tier elites are the ones who come out looking best-of-the-worst in this new scheme. As you move down the totem pole, you’re less and less likely to benefit. And that, perhaps, is the point. United is rewarding its highest-spenders. But it’s harming its mid- and lower-tier spenders. And that seems like it could hurt them in the long run.
This leaves only American Airlines using the certificate-based method of reserving upgrades (for Gold and Platinum AAdvantage members). It will be interesting to see if low- and mid-tier United elites start defecting to American, or if American will join the rest of their peers in going “unlimited.”
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October 13th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
My objections are that the benefits are opposite. 1K flyers have more upgrades than they know what to do with. I have 500-mile upgrades expire all the time because I can’t get rid of them fast enough, even on short hop flights. So I’m not gaining anything with unlimited upgrades, because I was applying for an upgrade on every domestic flight I flew anyhow.
New Premier flyers who hadn’t accrued any 500-mile upgrades yet, on the other hand, will suddenly be able to get upgrades right away on equal terms with more advanced Premier flyers. This is a bonus for them (to the detriment of more seasoned Premier level flyers).
The biggest loss for 1Ks is the disappearing of confirmed regional upgrades that would often confirm at the moment of purchase. And as mentioned above, the loss for everyone is the lack of upgradeability for P.S. flights
October 14th, 2009 at 1:37 am
I’m an AAdvantage loyalist, and fly on United once or twice a year, so I’m not familiar with their upgrade process. So pardon the silly question, but what is a regional upgrade? Do they offer a two class configuration on United Express?
October 14th, 2009 at 6:06 am
@Antonio, the narrow window of advantage for newly-minted Premiers is indeed a move up for them, but they’ll still be well behind Premier Executives and 1Ks. Ask entry-level Continental elites how often they upgrade…
@Bob, the regional upgrade or “confirmed regional” is an electronic certificate issued to Premier Executive 1K-level members (who earn 100,000 elite qualifying miles per year). I believe 1Ks would earn 2 of these certificates per quarter if 10,000 miles were flown in that quarter on UA/UA Express operated flights. The confirmed regional upgrade could be applied to an entire existing itinerary within “region 1” — North America, Hawaii, Caribbean, and Central America as early as the time of purchase. So if there are open seats, you receive confirmation of your upgrades well in advance of the normal upgrade window. And that’s going away.
And regarding United Express, yes, there are flights marketed as “exPlus” with two classes (or two-and-half, if you count Economy Plus). These are ~70-seat CRJ-700 and Embraer 170 planes. The smaller regional jets (CRJ-200, Embraer 145) are one-class.
October 14th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
OK, this doesn’t sound great, but did anybody consider that this might be an alignment to a future (unannounced) Star Alliance benefit of unlimited upgrades? Think about such a benefit – if you’ve got top-tier status, it wouldn’t matter if you flew UA, US, CO, AC in economy, because you would most likely get the bump up front. Most Star Alliance members allow you to use miles to upgrade class of service, why not extend an automatic upgrade benefit for domestic routes (within a continent)? I frequently fly other Star Alliance carriers and it makes no sense to me that they will have 4 empty rows of first/business class on a domestic flight with 10 Star Golds sitting in a packed economy cabin. Show us a little Star love!
October 14th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Thanks Mark, I’ve seen the references to the regional upgrades and didn’t understand the significance.
October 15th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Wow, Brian, that would indeed be awesome! But it also might reduce my loyalty to UA specifically; in other words, nowadays, I will often prioritize taking a flight on UA vs. one of its *A partners due to upgrade potentials. But if I have an equal (or even better) chance being upgraded on a partner airline, well…
October 15th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Adam, there’s a potential downside to choosing a *A partner over UA. If you’re on a Y/B fare or better on UA metal, you get the 50% EQM/EQS bonus, which helps a lot of folks earn/retain status in the first place. I realize that’s a big “if” for a lot of flyers. Then again, US gov’t contract fares are Y fares, so it’s a nontrivial fraction of travelers.
Also, regardless of booking class there’s the redeemable miles (RDM) bonus — 25% to 100% — you get for staying on UA metal. The only partner activity that produces this same Mileage Plus credit is a) flights on US and b) US-Europe on Lufthansa.
October 15th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
@Mark – just to be clear, with a regional (CR1) you can get early confirmation if there is an open “upgrade” seat available, not just any open C/F seat. United maintains a separate upgrade inventory (NC/NF) from the regular C/F classes, and availability is often zero. That said, I have often gotten my CR1 requests confirmed ahead of the e500 window, and with enough flexibility was able to choose flights that had availability at booking.
Many of my e500s actually expire since I mostly fly internationally. So I’ll now not get those 500 miles for each expired e500 – another negative of the change.
October 15th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
@Oliver, yes, I was careless in my words. I said “open seats,” and I should have said “open inventory” in the upgrade fare bucket. You are indeed correct.
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