Re: United bankruptcy
I know I am not alone among business travelers when I try to catch every spare scrap of information I can find about the United bankruptcy.
I’d like to say that I’m terribly concerned about the impact on the airline industry, what this says about our country’s chances for economic recovery, and the scores of employees that may lose their jobs. Let’s say that I am.
But just between us, I only want to scream “WHAT ABOUT THE FREQUENT FLYER PLAN? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MAN, AM I GOING TO KEEP MY PREMIERE EXECUTIVE STATUS???”
United Premiere Executive (or even just Premiere) is more than a frequent flyer plan. It’s a coming-of-age in the business traveler world. It’s the badge of the seasoned veteran.
So what makes United more significant than, say, American or Delta? Three words: Red-eye flights.
United has more red-eye flights to more places than any other carrier (in my experience; I haven’t done any research or anything). A red-eye is a flight that takes off after 10 pm and lands after midnight. Why on God’s green Earth would anyone take a flight like that?
I live in Berkeley, California. I spent six weeks working five days per week in Boston, MA this summer. I left Boston at 5:30 PM on Friday, and had to be in Boston before noon on Monday. That meant that I got into Oakland at midnight on Friday, and would have to leave at 5 PM on Sunday to be in Boston by 2 AM. In order to have any semblance of a weekend with my loved ones, I’d forgo the extra six hours of jet-lagged non-sleep in a hotel for the 11:45 PM red-eye flight, arriving in Boston at 9 AM (3 hour layover in Chicago); most business travelers would.
The only real reward we get for traveling The Longest Flight is frequent flyer miles. United Premiere and Premiere Exec are some of the cushiest in the business. Priority boarding and check-in, upgrades, Economy Plus seating (five more inches of legroom), and a discount to the Red Carpet club, with free high-speed Internet access, priority check in, and free cappuccino in some locations. And United doesn’t give it away: you have to fly 25,000 miles or 30 segments to get Premiere, and 50,000 miles and 60 paid segments for Premiere Executive (a transcontinental round-trip, say from San Francisco to New York, is about 6000 miles) in a calendar year. That’s about five round-trip transcontinental flights per year to maintain status. That’s a lot of nights sleeping on gate benches in Chicago.
My program status isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. It is only what it was designed to be: a reward for the poor saps who have sacrificed a normal life for a life on the road, and choosing one set of uncomfortable metal seats dusted with pretzel salt for another. But it IS something: three hypothetical free tickets to Europe which they know I’ll never redeem, because when I do get vacation, the last place I want to spend it is on a plane.
1:18:45 PM 
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