Benefits and Risks of Eliminating Award Charts and a New Feature of the American Airlines App

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About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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  1. The rental car one appears to be the other way around: Someone renamed the car’s Bluetooth name to POS, rather than someone’s phone being named that.

  2. The Benefits and Risks analysis from PDD is very well done. However I think it undervalues the cost hit to United because of the following factors:

    (1) More customers will redeem for *A partner awards, which could cost UA real $$ when it has to true up accounts with its partners
    (2) Conversely, UA customers may instead decide to use *A partners to book award travel on UA (to the extent those partners offer cheaper awards on UA metal) and thus UA loses out on revenue from UA mileage sales
    (3) the value of lost sales from top customers who decide to start booking elsewhere (because they no longer want UA miles) is significant but not calculated.

    UA has been way off in the past when forecasting the costs/benefits of new programs (e.g. Basic Economy) so no reason to think they got it right here.

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