Originally Posted by
Machine27
It was a popular suggestion but I don't think it will happen as giving someone status miles would effectively be giving them a year of status they would otherwise not have been entitled to? It would only be a useful gesture in quite specific cases, although off the top of my head I can think of a few times where I may have done this (a BA Gold who was now flying frequently with KLM but had yet to attain status, a former FB Platinum who had since retired but flew a few times per year with KLM, and an FB Ivory frequent traveller who flew on both AF/KL and LCCs whose travel could perhaps have been converted to 100% Skyteam if he got a taste of a few useful benefits).
Like you, I do not think it will happen, because Flying Blue will make a huge fuss if the idea is ever aired to them and will categorically refuse.
It is a shame because it is an intelligent proposal in the sense that the whole point of customer recovery in my view is making people replace memories of a bad problem by memories of a good solution and restore trust which may well have been damaged by an unfortunate event.
In that sense, it makes sense to try and use things that the customers will appreciate, and I do think many frequent flyers appreciate status. I would also argue that by and large, with FB, status is much easier to achieve by segments than by miles anyway so giving, for instance, a 5000 status miles boost does not really distort status value as it will effectively only make it easier to regain/achieve status for people who are accruing large amounts of status miles already and thus typically contribute to more benefits than those achieving the equivalent status in terms of segments.
An alternative would be giving people choices, e.g - 3,000 status miles OR 10,000 award miles OR a €100 voucher as different people may value different recovery items. For instance, I am not particularly keen on award miles as I often find them hard to use on FB, and since I tend to mostly use miles for long haul J tickets, a 10,000 miles gift is a bit of a drop of water considering the typical cost of 125-200k award costs (plus taxes).
That said, while I typically prefer vouchers, like an idiot I let several of them expire which presumably meaning that several hundreds of euros worth of travel are now lost forever so I guess the advantage of miles is that at least they don't expire unless people don't accrue for 20 months!