I’ll be heading for San Francisco Bay Area early this week, accompanying Meda who will be presiding over the mid-year meeting of the American Society of Criminology’s board of directors. ASC is her primary professional association, and she was elected to serve as president for a one-year term. She’ll be working, while I’m just along for the ride.

United gave us an unwelcome jolt this morning when I went online to check us in for our departing flight.

Background. We both flew quite a bit in previous jobs, and both have flown more than a million mile with United Airlines, earning permanent “Gold” status in their MileagePlus Program.

Unfortunately for us, the perks associated with that million mile status have been slowly shrinking. The main benefits include not having to worry about baggage fees, and automatically qualifying for United’s “economy plus” seating, which gives additional legroom, a welcome if you’re my height.

We also qualify for automatic upgrades if any of those seats are free. For a while, our million mile status meant that we frequently received upgrades. But a few years ago, United changed the order in which upgrades are doled out. One of the central themes is that now the amount that you pay for your tickets is a much more important factor than how many miles you have previously racked up with the airline. So frequent flyers like us found ourselves demoted, while business flyers who typically pay higher fares are more likely to get upgraded.

Now we find upgrades few and far between. But you feel like there’s always a chance.

Then today United added a new wrinkle that we had not seen before. In order to qualify for any available upgrade, United requires that people traveling together be split on to separate reservations. I presume this is done in order to make the assignment of upgrades a little simpler for the airline.

But today after selecting that option, an alert flashed on the screen disclosing the down side of being reassigned to separate reservations. United wanted us to know that if something goes wrong with our flight, say it’s delayed for one reason or another, and we are forced to change flights or aircraft, we will be treated by their reservation system as independent travelers and may not be able to be seated together.

If you’re traveling alone, it obviously would make no difference. But if you’re traveling as a family, or with a travel companion, that’s a pretty significant down side associated with going into the upgrade queue, especially since flight issues are probably more likely to occur than upgrades.

So this trip, we declined to accept the separate reservations and, it seems, any possibility of an upgrade.

The way I see it, we’re have to give up a promised perk, the possibility of a frequent flyer upgrade, in order to be sure that we’ll be traveling together. Not the end of the world, but just another little way that United is dissing its loyal customers.

Maybe someday a competing airline will offer to qualify us for frequent flyer perks based on our accumulated United miles. I suspect that we wouldn’t be the only ones to be tempted by such an offer.