United Is Cutting Mileage If You Don’t Have Their Credit Card — Now It’s Running Ads That Say You Matter Less

United is slashing the number of you earn for flights by up to 40% unless you have one of their credit cards. If you do, you’ll earn slightly more.

Henry Harteveldt warned that United risked sending the message to customers that ‘if you don’t have the credit card, you don’t matter.’

We can’t call these loyalty programs anymore and we can’t and shouldn’t call them frequent flyer programs anymore. These are travel spend programs and what United is saying to people very clearly is if you don’t carry a Chase co-branded credit card with United, you literally do not matter as much to us. Your money is not as green as the person who has that credit card.

That framing seemed a little harsh until United started spending ad money to make the exact point. (HT: Enilria)

This is all part of the airline’s goal to raise MileagePlus profits by 50% in four years, something the carrier attempted and failed at before. And of course there are customers who won’t or can’t get the card.

• United is by far the most global U.S. airline, and has customers all over the world in countries that make them ineligible to get a United credit card.
• There’s the expat business executive flying worldwide in business class but without a deep U.S. credit history.
• There are Global Services members who have had too many new cards to get approved for one with Chase.
• And there are customers whose credit is too new – but who will grow and mature and earn more and build credit, they’re already flying United, love the brand and the program, but will get told they don’t matter with these changes.

Some of them might get pushed to take and spend on the debit card (just having the United debit card isn’t enough). United may convert more customers to get the credit card with these changes. Of course, these changes do nothing to get customers to put any spend on the card, just get approved for it and keep it. But it might do that at the expense of having more cardmembers and more card spend later. Time will tell!