Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Gold is the New Silver: How American Airlines is like Trojan and Starbucks

So American Airlines (née US Airways) just announced their 2015 elite program, and the travel bloggers are starting to exhale. It's not awful unless you flew more than 75k but less than 100k miles last year...

What strikes me about their new system is the elite levels: Gold, Platinum, and Executive Platinum. No Silver; you get Gold for only 25,000 miles flown. I guess they want their (in)frequent fliers to feel like those special folks over at United and Delta even though they had to fly 50,000 miles to get Gold!

This is such a fantastic consultant-like move, isn't it? Name the lowest "elite" level "Gold" and your frequent fliers will feel like they've accomplished something! They can wave their badge at those Unitards and Deltoids and say "see, I'm Gold too!"

And it's so Starbucks, so Trojan. There's no longer a "small"; there's just Great, Awesome, and Executive Awesome! At least there's no Blue...

2 comments:

  1. You do realize last year American Airlines 25,000 mile elite status was called "gold", right? Same with the elite leveling.

    This isn't new on AA.

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