Opinion ID: 3167688
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: United never agreed to provide the 2011 Premier

Text: Program benefits under the 2012 Premier Program. In September 2011 United announced the newly revised benefits associated with the 2012 MileagePlus program’s premier status levels, and the plaintiffs do not dispute that United faithfully provided the premier benefits identified in the September 2011 announcement. Instead, in an apparent last‐ditch effort to establish a breach, the plaintiffs argue that their qualification for the 2012 Premier Program entitled them to receive, in 2012, the benefits that were previously offered in 2011 under the 2011 Premier Program. This argument is as devoid of evidentiary support as it is counterintuitive. There is no evidence that United expressed an intention to offer the benefits of 2011 premier status in 2012 under the 2012 Premier Program, let alone that it contractually bound itself to do so. Indeed, United did not even so much as identify the benefits of 2012 premier status until it unveiled the newly amended benefits for that year in September 2011. True, the premier status webpages in 2011 12 Nos. 15‐1836 & 15‐1845 also listed a differing set of premier benefits prior to September of that year, but those benefits were expressly identified as the “benefits for 2011 elite status”; the webpages gave no indication of what the forthcoming benefits for 2012 premier status would be.3 The plaintiffs appear perplexed that a premier status earned in 2011 should not also deliver the benefits of the 2011 Premier Program. But this is easily explained by the fact that members qualified for premier status in the year preceding the year for which the status was granted. The Premier Program’s prospective operation means that members who qualified for premier status in 2011 did not earn 2011 premier status, but 2012 premier status, along with the corresponding benefits available under the 2012 Premier Program. In other words, the record establishes that qualification for 2012 premier status entitled members to receive, in 2012, the benefits under the program in effect during the year for which they qualified (2012)—not the benefits under the program in effect during the year in which they qualified (2011).4 3 Starting nearly a year before the September 2011 announcement, United’s website also included a series of regular updates heralding the “new world‐class” MileagePlus program of 2012. Not surprisingly, there is no evidence that the much anticipated benefits of the “new” premier status levels of 2012 were contractually required to be nothing but a drab carbon copy of the benefits offered under the expired program of the previous year. 4 As noted above, qualifying for 2012 premier status in 2011 also entitled members to receive the benefits associated with 2011 premier status for the remainder of 2011. The plaintiffs do not allege that they did Nos. 15‐1836 & 15‐1845 13 At bottom, the plaintiffs’ argument on appeal is that United breached a contractual promise to provide them with premier benefits in 2012 that matched the premier benefits previously available in 2011. The undisputed evidence shows that United never made that promise, and United cannot be liable for breaching a contract that it did not make.