Forget press releases. Continental Airlines decided to circumvent the entire mass media when it came to announcing fare class changes for its frequent fliers, and instead posted the news to an online bulletin board.
In a post on FlyerTalk, Scott O’Leary, Managing Director, Customer Experience (FlyerTalk user name CO Insider), announced changes to Continental’s fare classes effective Jan. 16, 2009, for travel dated Jan. 21, 2009, and beyond,
- If you’re traveling on or after Jan. 21, your fare classes will change. All itineraries departing on or after Jan. 21 will be converted to the new fare classes starting on Jan. 16th. If you have an existing reservation for travel on or after Jan. 21, the only thing that’ll change is your fare class (if applicable) – your seats and eTickets won’t be affected. This process of updating the fare classes in our existing reservations will take several days.
- Pardon our dust during the migration. During this fare class migration, some functions will be temporarily unavailable, most notably advance seat assignments (through any channel except check-in), our Elite Upgrade Automation (EUA) and the standby lists on continental.com/info. As you can imagine, these outages will lead to high call volumes as well during this period.
- Upgrades for travel on Jan. 16-19 will be generous but unconventional. Our EUA and automatic OnePass reward waitlist clearance will be paused Jan. 16-19. Eligible customers traveling on these days will be upgraded using our most generous assumptions possible in advance of these systems going offline. Eligible customers not upgraded in advance will still be added to upgrade standby list upon check-in, and when applicable, cleared at the gate using our normal process. EUA and automatic reward waitlist clearance will resume on Jan. 19 for customers traveling Jan. 20 and onward. If this timeframe changes, we’ll let you know.
- Content on continental.com and elsewhere will be updated. As you can imagine, we have a lot of content that references our fare classes. This content will be updated as we get closer to the fare class changes.
- Mileage and EQM earnings will be same, if not slightly more generous. With one exception, our Elite Qualification and base miles will not change. The one that will change is the new G class (currently Q class), which will increase to 100% Elite Qualification Miles (EQMs) instead of 50%, regardless of where booked. We still stand behind our rationale of offering lower Elite Qualification for those who book our most heavily-discounted fares and don’t book at continental.com. That said, we’ve done some homework based on your feedback and will use this timing to redefine the boundary.
At first glance, the new fare classes appear to be a move to bring Continental in line with United’s and/or Star Alliance’s fare structure, so it seems that the alliance between Continental and United is well on its way to becoming reality.
