New UA Mileage Rules
 

I got email today from UA stating that effective March 15, 2015, miles will accrue by cost not by distance flown. Award miles earned per $ is as follows...5 per $ for regular member, 7 for premier, 8 for gold, 9 for platinum and 11 for the 1K'ers. My loyalty to UA gets less and less with each change they make. I fly to CA a lot and as of now get about 5k miles a round trip regardless of my fare paid. Now if I get a sale for say $300 I will only 2100 as a silver member, more than half of what I get now. Even paying a $400 fare I will only get 2800 miles. Are all the airlines doing this? I think I read Delta has stRted this method.

That's March 1, sorry.

Thanks for the news yestravel. I checked my email and sure enough I got the same mileagePlus new rules.

Wow! That's quite disheartening. I fly to Asia once, sometimes twice a year (and a few times to Europe), and with that new rule, its getting more and more difficult to maintain my gold status. I don't know if I'll even reach premier silver by the end of 2015!!

Delta is doing this. The expectation is that American will as well when its FF program is fully merged with US Airways.

I'm also quite unhappy with these changes. I'm a million-miler (gold forever) so don't have to worry about maintaing my status, but I'm wondering just how useful my status and my miles will be in the future...

JoyC, I read through this pretty quickly, but my understanding is that it applies to redeemable miles and not elite qualifying miles. Per this page:
http://mileageplusupdates.com/#faq
"Premier qualifying miles and segments are still based on the number of paid flight miles traveled and the fare purchased and, where applicable, PQD are still determined by the base fare and carrier imposed surcharges.”

And in the e-mail:
"What's not changing: MileagePlus Premier status levels and qualification
These developments won't change the way you qualify for MileagePlus Premier status in 2015. All the current Premier qualification criteria will stay the same."

Regarding American, I should say that **speculation** is that it will follow Delta and United. Obviously no one can know for sure. :)

Huge implication for those of us traveling longhaul international in Y. Along with the PDQ implementation, it's really the end of playing the "loyalty" game with the US carriers. We'll have to decide whether to stay with *A and deposit to SQ/OZ or just choose routing trip-by-trip.

Not that I welcome this, but it really is no surprise. The FF bubble is bursting!

Thanks ms_go for the clarification regarding Premier qualification. I was so focused on the new mileage accrual rules I completely read over it!!