MilesBuzz! - '22 Million Awards Redeemed in 07...Is That ENOUGH Info?

Quote from Randy Petersen:
The reality is that airlines gave away more than 22 million (earned) free tickets last year.


Well, since you decided to bring up that subject, I thought it would be worth a little bit more of an in-depth discussion!!!!!

22 million awards is a nice number; 8-9% of all airline seat allocations are awards is also a nice number.

But what I would like to learn about is a not a nice number, but some REVEALING numbers........

How many of the 22 million awards were:
* regular vs. double miles awards
* domestic vs. international awards
* Coach vs. Business vs. First Class awards
* peak vs. off-peak season awards
* high demand vs. low demand routes

Let's face it, the 'value' of an award differes radically based on those above criteria, so the generalizations of total number or % of awards is not particularly telling.

A 'Saver' award in Coach between Cleveland and Omaha in mid-January has a far different utility that a 'Standard' award in Business between Cleveland and Paris in mid-July for a frequent flyer. These two awards have NOTHING in common, other than they are awards.

It is precisely the subcategories of award redemption patterns that will best reveal an FFPs performance. Any FFP can conceivably 'pad' their RAW award redemption numbers and percentages by all of the offpeak, non-trunk routing, coach awards.

Any chance that the airlines can provide a more meaningful breakdown of their award redemptions. Quantity of redemptions is definitely one metric worth knowing, but the QUALITY of redemptions is equally compelling info to have to assess the FFPs perfeormance on behalf of their membership..



This is cross-posted in ORP, but this forum gets more traffic, and is extremely relevant to this forum.

I haven't seen the original quote, so correct me if I am wrong, but, if it was said that 22 million awards were redeemed in 07 and the number represented a 8-9% of bookings, then the numbers don't add up.
According to IATA figures regrouped on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_largest_airlines), the top 10 airlines have about 600 million embarkations per annum.
Let's have an average of 3 embarkations per ticket (a round-trip ticket with one connection), and we're talking 200 million tickets issued by the top 10. 9% of 200m is 18m, and that's before you factor in the airlines that didn't make it to the top ten, which include some obviously sizable players like SQ, MH, AC, SK, CX, SU, IB, CO, Easyjet (is their code 4U or what?), AB, BA, FR, AC, plus every single airline from the Middle East (!!!), Africa, Oceania and South (as well as Central) America.
It's either a higher percentage or a smaller number of awards.

Randy quoted the '22 million awards'.

I added the 8-9%, based on what the major US airlines reported.... just to give some additional context to what the 22 million awards represented. I can't be sure if the 8-9% can be extrapolated across the world. And to be honest, I'm not sure if RP's '22 million' quote is based on US or world figures.

Suffice to say, the focus of the thread is whether the QUANTITY of award redemptions is a SUFFICIENT enough number to gauge the QUALITY of such redemptions.

Quote from Randy Petersen:
The reality is that airlines gave away more than 22 million (earned) free tickets last year.


Well, since you decided to bring up that subject, I thought it would be worth a little bit more of an in-depth discussion!!!!!

A 'Saver' award in Coach between Cleveland and Omaha in mid-January has a far different utility that a 'Standard' award in Business between Cleveland and Paris in mid-July for a frequent flyer. These two awards have NOTHING in common, other than they are awards.


Isn't it the flyer who determines the value? The point is the FLYER redeemed the award and most likely considered them to be of value. Too many subjective variables. Perhaps using a value of a comparable purchased flight might be better but I would rather see the airlines spend their time and resources on services rather than research of FF "value".

A 'Saver' award in Coach between Cleveland and Omaha in mid-January has a far different utility that a 'Standard' award in Business between Cleveland and Paris in mid-July for a frequent flyer. These two awards have NOTHING in common, other than they are awards.


I think I'm missing your point. Who says that a Paris mid-july award has more utility? If I need to get to Omaha in Jan and have no need to get to Paris then I'd argue the opposite is true.

Each person redeeming awards determine utility.

I guess I'm not clear on the point you are trying to make....:confused:

I think I'm missing your point. Who says that a Paris mid-july award has more utility? If I need to get to Omaha in Jan and have no need to get to Paris then I'd argue the opposite is true.

Each person redeeming awards determine utility.

I guess I'm not clear on the point you are trying to make....:confused:

I agree with this point.
Some of the best-value mileage routes actually are to places you may never want to travel to but nonetheless are important because of their politics or natural resources.
Luanda anyone?

I suspect that most of these 22 million awards across the airlines are economy awards. Remember that FTers are of some minority when it comes to the statistics on air travel. Not many people would value their miles as we do here - i.e. would rather cash in more miles for better value of flying C or F.

So, statistically speaking, I'd say about 70% of these awards are for coach awards, with an equal combination of remaining 30% for premium awards.

I suspect that most popular are the U.S. domestic awards, Canada and Caribbean, Europe, and Asia Pacific, etc.

Again these are estimates based on general observation ;)

The 22 million number is almost as meaningful as last year's national league ERA. :D

What I would like to see is a truth in disclosure rule:

(1) Exact date when seats are made available on each flight.
(2) How many seats are made available on that date in each class of service.
(3) Date when additional inventory is added.
(4) Similiar information for upgrade inventory.
(5) Similar information for partner awards.

The aggregate number of awards, even broken down by segment, are not of interest to me. I want to know how I can get an award not how many people got one last year. And it should be publicly available so that everyone has a level playing field.

If airlines do not release saver business class seats at 330 day mark on certain routes, they should tell us. If there are some routes that never have saver seats (or that don't get additional inventory once it's gone, e.g. Hawaii at Xmas) they should tell us. This would benefit everyone by allowing them to make rational decisions. Lack of information is dishonest when the program award charts suggest otherwise (Delta is probably an exception as it has now made it pretty clear that saver awards are history on any popular routes).