For a limited time only you can save on award travel. The time frame is limited as you need to book between July 15 - July 24, 2009 and fly between August 18 - November 18, 2009. I played with a few options as I was looking at a flight to Barcelona in late August but wasn’t able to find anything available using award travel. These airline offerings are typically a mixed blessing. The airline hopes to get rid of excess seat inventory due to poor demand planning, but the popular routes are not available because…well they are popular. The promotion is structured to target as many folks as possible by giving the impression of high availability and big savings.
Unfortunately, the outcome usually results in potential customers NOT finding anything worth flying because the routes are terrible, the timing isn’t right, or the destination is undesirable. We end up wasting our time playing with arrival / departures dates. It’s like taking your garbage, wrapping it in a shiny box, and offering it to your best customers. It produces the opposite affect as we don’t feel like we’re getting a special promotion – we feel like United doesn’t really value us as a customer so much as just a revenue stream (i.e. dumping ground) with little intelligence. It should be painfully obvious the target demographic travels a lot, values their time, and doesn’t have much flexibility. This promotion totally ignores all those key factors. United needs to take a step back, look at their customers, then tailor their promotions for the right target audience.
Hey United, how about figuring a way to immediately communicate which routes have excess capacity in the time frame given so we don’t waste our time when you already know. Our time is just as important as yours.
Here’s hoping you’ll find the promotion plays into a trip you were planning anyways…