Airline Loyalty

Since the beginning of September, Qatar Airways has been running a good premium cabin promotion for Privilege Club members looking to boost their Avios balances and/or their progress to elite status, but with the end of the month looming, there are a few days left to participate.

The radical changes to Delta's SkyMiles program were only made public a couple of weeks ago, but already the vultures are circling. On Monday, Alaska Airlines was the first to offer SkyMiles members an alternative home and now JetBlue has joined the fray with what appears to be a very generous status match offer to Delta flyers looking for a more appropriate frequent flyer program.

United Airlines is running a 4 day Economy Class award sale for travel on its routes between the US and Europe. The sale ends on 29 September and travel has to be complete by mid December.

The dust may not have yet settled on the remains of the old Delta Skymiles program, but with details of the new Skymiles program already angering, upsetting or annoying what appears to be a significant number of people, Alaska Airlines is making moves to capitalize on Delta's disenchanted flyers.

Delta has had a problem with overcrowding in its Sky Clubs for some time and in the past couple of years, it has brought in various measures to try and sort the problem out. Unfortunately, none of these measures have made much of a difference so far.

Delta has announced that it will be moving down the path that American Airline's forged back in 2022 by revamping its frequent flyer program and using just a single metric to decide what elite status (if any) members of the program should have.

Virgin Atlantic has announced that in a little under a week's time, the seating benefits associated with its Flying Club's Silver Tier will be changing, and while the reaction to this news will depend heavily on what fares people normally book, I suspect most people will see this as bad news.

In the past few hours, Emirates has announced that it will be moving to offer an all-A380 service on its route between Dubai and Sydney before the end of the year. It has also confirmed that it is in talks with Adelaide airport with the aim of restarting service to South Australia once the airline's new Airbus A350s begin to arrive.

In recent times, Qantas is probably the best known airline to publish flights on which all seats can only be purchased using miles or points (rather than cash), but in April this year, British Airways joined in the fun when it announced 'Avios only' flights to/from Sharm El Sheikh and Geneva.

As JetBlue has a partnership with American Airlines, most people who fly with the airline probably credit their flights to either JetBlue's TrueBlue program or to the American Airlines AAdvantage program. For JetBlue's transatlantic flights, however, the AAdvantage program isn't an option and that's where another of the airline's partnerships can suddenly become useful.