Airline Loyalty

With airlines like American offering up to 5 elite status levels (if you include the invitation only "Concierge Key" level) and British Airways offering 3 official levels and possibly even a 4th and 5th (if you separate out Gold Guest List flyers and Premier card holders) some have been questioning whether or not the oneworld alliance needs to add an additional tier.

Etihad doesn't belong to an airline alliance but, thanks to its investment in a number of other airlines, it does have what it calls "a partnership". The partnership is made up of 8 airlines contains Alitalia and, more surprisingly, airberlin which is a member of the oneworld alliance. Up until now, from a flyer benefits perspective, the partnership hasn't been that well coordinated...but Etihad has just changed all of that.

I was sitting in an airport lounge idly browsing through my Twitter feed when I noticed two tweets, one after the other, which made me sit up and pay attention...literally. They weren't tweets from an official source but they were from someone who's got a pretty decent track record of getting information before it has been released and, if I understand these tweets correctly, some BA flyers are about to find that earning status is going to get a lot harder.

British Airways launched a Triple Avios promotion last week but, what should have been a simple enough promotion to understand, turned out to be confusing and contradictory. The blame for the mess lies squarely at the feet of whoever drafted the promotion details and whoever gave the go ahead to post those details to the British Airways website.

American Airlines has just released details of what the AAdvantage program is going to look like going forward and it's almost universally bad news for miles & points collectors and those of us who've enjoyed what used to be the best airline loyalty program out there. The Delta-isation of AAdvantage is upon us so those with a weak disposition should probably stop reading now.

Delta is not an airline I write about a lot because it doesn't come up in my travels very much and, to be frank, I really don't know enough about it to make too many useful or insightful comments. But I do know just how badly the airline has been squeezing its frequent flyers over the years (my commiserations if you're one of them) and I do know that the way Delta has peen prioritising upgrades for those flying with companions has been a big issue for Delta flyers. But things are about to change.

Singapore Airlines is one of the latest airlines to add a Premium Economy cabin to its aircraft and, while the addition of the new cabins has been anything but smooth, the airline is on track to have the all of the refits completed by the end of 2016. Now that Singapore Airlines is actually flying aircraft with their new Premium Economy product (e.g. A350 service between Singapore and Amsterdam) the airline has decided to upgrade its award chards to reflect the new product.

Singapore Airlines appears to have performed a bit of sleight of hand over the past few days and used an old magicians trick of focusing everyone's attention where it wants it to be while subtly doing something else over where no one is really looking.

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In this post I’m going to walk you through my search for an ultra-premium cabin award and I’ll show you the steps I go though when trying to spend as little cash as possible on an award ticket.

One of the better ways to see just what effect the devaluations to a program will have is to compare what you earned under the existing policies and earning structure to what you would have earned if the new, devalued, policies and earning rates had been in place instead. So that's exactly what I've done with my AAdvantage earnings here.

Avianca's LifeMiles program has been selling miles in ever increasing quantities recently and, while its very tempting to snap up miles at a cheap rate when you can, there's a reason why I'm not ready to dive in just yet.

A couple of days ago I published a post discussing how the recently announced changes to the AAdvantage Program would affect award redemptions by European based AAdvantage members (American Airlines AAdvantage Award Chart Devaluations – Euro Travelers’ Viewpoint) and it wasn't pretty. In this post I'm going to show how the changes to how we earn redeemable miles, being introduced from late 2016, makes everything doubly bad. Yep, I'm full of good news this week!

Sometimes I can't catch a break - I take two days out to do something other than watching what the various loyalty programs, airlines and hotel chains are doing and then Marriott goes and buys Starwood and American Airlines announces an enormous award chart devaluation. That last one was the worst because the announcement came while I was at 34,000ft somewhere over Europe (and without WiFi access) and I only saw the news when I landed back at Heathrow (very late at night). Airlines really don't consider miles & points bloggers when they release their news! :)

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