Elite Status

All about Elite Status

RMF and CLV – Wharton marketing professor defends Delta’s mileage changes

March 7, 2014 by unroadwarrior 1 Comment

RMF: Recency, Monetary value and Frequency CLV: Client Lifetime Value These are two of the technical terms that Wharton Marketing professor Peter Fader uses in this excellent interview to explain Delta’s changes to their mileage program. As you may have heard by now, Delta is switching to a new earning program from 2015 where passengers…

2013 – A (Personal) Travel Year in Review

January 6, 2014 by unroadwarrior Leave A Comment

2013 was an interesting year. Both for me personally from a travel perspective and also for the travel industry. Several firsts and several changes – some for the good and some for the bad. Here are a few I care about. Personal Travel recap: Personally, 2013 was a very interesting year. I made it to…

Alliance Wars: The post US Airways – American Airlines world – Part I

November 19, 2013 by unroadwarrior 7 Comments

There are three alliances in the world of Air Travel: Star Alliance OneWorld and SkyTeam Of these three, Star Alliance has been a very dominant alliance – mainly because of the sheer number of airlines they have (28 at the time of posting this), as opposed to OneWorld (13) and SkyTeam (19). Across their members,…

Tracking a United International BusinessFirst Upgrade

November 4, 2013 by unroadwarrior 1 Comment

On a recent flight to Tokyo, I used a United Global Premier Upgrade (GPU) to request an upgrade for myself to BusinessFirst. The upgrade did not clear when applied and it did not even clear at the 24 hour before the flight mark. At that point, United turns over the regular upgrade process, which is…

CPUs, RPUs, GPUs: all the United PUs (Premier Upgrades)

August 29, 2013 by unroadwarrior 6 Comments

One the benefits of being an Elite on an airline is the ability to get upgraded to upper class seats on flights. Anyone can use miles and upgrade themselves (more and more with a co-pay), provided space is available. Elite customers though get the ability to get upgraded with using up valuable miles. United has…

Lifetime Miles

March 23, 2013 by unroadwarrior 10 Comments

I logged into United.com this morning and saw my lifetimes miles total – 500,024. I am half-way to become a Million Miler! For United MileagePlus, One Million Miles is a significant milestone (no pun intended). It gives you and a significant other Gold Status for life! No matter how many miles you fly in a…

Last minute Elite qualification with United Choices from Chase

December 28, 2012 by unroadwarrior 14 Comments

Chase Card holders with most United Credit Cards need not lose hope. If you are within 5,000 PQM (Elite miles) of reaching your Elite miles target for the year and you cannot make the last flight you needed to get over the threshold, you have an option! Elite qualification is something some of us have…

Frontier, US Airways and Lufthansa – Cards with additional miles for Balance Transfers

November 4, 2012 by unroadwarrior 8 Comments

I found three new credit cards that not only have a sign-up bonus, but also offer extra miles for transferring you balance. This is a unique opportunity to earn miles for transferring balances to potentially lowers interest rate APRs and earn some miles along the way! Not too many cards offer miles for balance transfers.…

Airline news from around the web

May 5, 2012 by unroadwarrior 2 Comments

I have been traveling. I will post an article on my recent travel soon. I did write some on the flights, but the posts are still in outline form. Got some work to do. In the meanwhile, the world did not stop and things have been going on in the past few days. Here are…

Reader question: What is ‘minimum miles’?

April 4, 2012 by unroadwarrior Leave A Comment

In my last post I wrote about earning a minimum of 500 miles for flights taken. This prompted a question from a reader – what is this minimum miles you speak of? Well, here is the answer. Airlines award miles for flights based on the miles flown. For flights that are very short – less…