Originally Posted by
franklin_m
Say I'm a member of one of the airline premium travel programs, where I pay money to be part of the club. I get affinity programs, newsletters, special notices, custom luggage tags, etc. in addition to access to the facilities at the airports. Whether I go into the facility in Detroit, Minneapolis, Atlanta, or elsewhere, there's a certain base level of amenities that I get for that membership dollar. Sure some have more, for example only one of the Delta clubs in Detroit has showers, but in all there's similar food, service, reading material, services, drinks, chairs, etc.
That is far from the case with AMA clubs. You pay for the base membership, but then you also have to pay a separate fee to "go in" each of the facilities. And those facilities are far from consistent.
Point being not everyone has access to clubs that are "well maintained" and "[have] nice amenities". For years I've been said that the strongest reason for AMA membership is a quality field close to where someone lives. I've advocated that they geolocate members, survey clubs for standard amenities, and then try to ensure that as many members as possible have access to the same level of amenities within some specific distance. Instead, what AMA does is tell clubs to DIY, and meanwhile they're plowing money into a giant site in the center of the country that most members will rarely if ever use (note 1). It's great for AMA staff and those that live in the area, but then again, maybe that's the true purpose.
Note 1: I'd be really curious to see data. (1) How many unique AMA numbers use the Taj-Muncie site each year for the past 5 or 10 years, (2) for each one of those unique numbers, how many times they visited each year, and (3) how many unique AMA numbers have never used the facility. I predict that AMA will never share that data with the members who are funding the site (all of us) because it'll show that the vast majority of members are funding a site used by very few individuals, and of those, they're heavily concentrated in the HQ.