Tuesday, December 17, 2019

On Achieving An Ecumenical Airline State

Frequent readers of this blog will know that de-I has been an incredibly loyal customer of United Airlines for decades. Initially, this was driven by my having achieved frequent flyer status and it being easier to maintain it than to build-up anew with another airline. Then I reached a million miles flown and I got status for life which made things much easier (there are all kinds of perks associated with status such as boarding earlier, getting premium seats at no extra cost, first preference when things go bad on rebooking).

As we moved into our transitioned, travel-loving state, we were able to make use of our frequent flyer points/miles to get upgrades on flights that made it more affordable to get business class. But over the last year or so, United changed how it does its rewards program so upgrades using miles are near impossible to get and free tickets using miles is equally impossible to find. Thus I began to search for the best deal I could find on whatever airline we were flying.

The result is that we are much more open to different airlines and use whichever one is the most effective. It has opened my mind to the fact, other airlines might have better service or seating. For example on my last trip to Ghana, the transatlantic portion was on American Airlines and their business class seats (at least on these flights) were way superior to ones I've had on United lately.

It has been refreshing.