Let me try this:
Under UALs previous pass travel policy, only retirees with 25 yrs or more were given a higher boarding priority and that was only domestic, no international.
This was the only group of people singled out for any special treatment.
Very few people actually liked this and that included the retirees themselves.
All other retirees -25 didn’t get this important domestic privilege.
Most of the 25+ retirees that I know didn’t even want to get on ahead of people with more “seniority”; they actually felt guilty about it.
Over the years many people tried to change this but the company was insistent that our 25+ people should get something and so they came up with this ridiculous idea because they ran out of gold watches.
Think about it for a moment; everybody is boarding by seniority, if this group lost this bump they would simply revert back to their original seniority and get on ahead of most of the same people they were getting on ahead of anyway. This was essentially a meaningless benefit and everybody knew it.
Importantly, this was the only group of people, boarding out of order.
Then along comes CO with all their groups of special people, boarding under numerous conditions and circumstances. Importantly here, they are used to, having groups with special “jump the line” privileges.
So they run a sham survey, form some committees and come up with this ridiculous set of boarding priorities.
Most of the people I knew and know were stunned by the fact that they didn’t even go to the bother of offering a choice for everyone to simply board by seniority regardless of active or retired. There should be no groups.
I don’t think the vast majority of retirees want better benefits than anyone else they would just like (and deserve) equal benefits, after all it’s the only one left.
I know a baker, when he was an active co-worker he got a bakers dozen and when he retired he got a bakers dozen.