Via Wandering Aramean & United’s tweet from about an hour ago, United Airlines will retain the ‘Mileage Plus’ name as its frequent flyer program. I’m in agreement with Seth that Continental’s ‘OnePass’ doesn’t carry the same strength of brand & name as Mileage Plus, so I’m happy with the not-so-shocking decision to keep it as Mileage Plus.
I’m not sure if the website is new today, or has been around for a while, but take a look at mileageplusmergerupdates.com. It summarizes all of the changes thus far and provides a forward-looking timeline of sorts with future announcements. It looks like this third quarter of 2011 is going to be pretty quiet, as they’ve just announced the program name, we can already link our OnePass & Mileage Plus accounts, and signage is continuing to appear systemwide.
What we’re all waiting on, of course, are the specifics of the Mileage Plus program for 2012 and beyond, which will be communicated in the fourth quarter according to the above. Is it simply going to be as we know it today, with the addition of a 75,000-mile “Premier Platinum†level? I thought American’s 30th Anniversary celebration of the AAdvantage program was a nice promotion, so United has a similar opportunity to do something extra special with the rollout and I really think they should. It would be a huge disservice to both United & Continental’s base of loyal frequent flyers to build the anticipation of having “the world’s greatest frequent flyer program” that “we’re really going to like” and then blow the official rollout by staying status quo. Come on United, take this opportunity by the horns and give us something special! For starters, I’d like a couple of personalized bag tags similar to what’s shown below:
Image courtesy United Airlines
I wonder what will happen to my onepass credit card. Benefits see to be better than the mileage plus card. Shame to lose them.
I’m sure it’ll still be a Chase card, but beyond that your guess is as good as mine right now.