Guava

Then they may as well dissolve Oneworld if it's simply every airline for itself. I cannot agree with such thinking, because you may think that's being smart, it will have the opposite effect. The main advantage of OW is its consistency, unlike the gazillion number of exceptions that *A and Skyteam have. Without that, OW would be just as bad as the other two. Customers will cease be loyal, then flight decision becomes a case by case decision as opposed to loyalty driven. Many companies have gone bankrupt because they were laser sharp focus on the short-term gains and because Executive compensations tend to reward these immediate results but that's neither in the best interests of shareholders or customers in the long run.

Cathay's profitability is not tied just to HKG based flyers, there are a lot of non-HKG based customers who are not part of MPC but give their business to CX/KA because they identify with OW. You alienate them, they will dump CX very quickly, which will translate into loss of future business and higher customer acquisition cost. Also, MPC members alone cannot fill all those empty seats that would otherwise go unused. The fact CX can release so many F seats for award suggest they are not expecting to sell a lot of those seats and it's impossible that MPC can fill all of the above even if you forbid partners from claiming it because AM redemption rate is ridiculously high that even MPC members hesitate of using these awards. So the net results is more seats will go empty or give away for free as Op-Ups which are really just wasted. If a customer can reasonably expect to get Op-up very often as someone tried to claim here, what incentive is there to purchase premium cabin? Op-up should not be a frequent event or that customer can expect it happen most of the time. It speaks volume about overbooking and inventory management and that on itself is another problem entirely.


The assumption of course is that MPC/AM members much prefer to redeem their F awards on CX, I don't think that's true, not for me anyway. I far prefer JL F over CX F, the overall experience of the former is hands down better than CX, especially if you end up with US based crew, in which case, you may as well be served by prison matrons. The essence of AM awards is to understand its complicated rules and whenever possible, use the OW award chart for distance >10K miles or stick with single partner award chart at the 5K miles each way range. For example, you can do JL+AA combo in First Class award out of LAX to most of China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan for only 155K in F award. If you want to go to HKG, it's doable for 155K using a combo of CX+JL+AA to stay within 14K: SFO-HKG-HND/NRT-SFO/SJC. Even if you don't live near LAX or SFO, position flights within the U.S. to these hubs should be very cheap.


So long as they don't devalue AM any further for the foreseeable future (e.g. by inflating award costs even more), I can live with that. Then again, I don't care much about CX F awards but I know some folks do so if they restrict the availability of CX F awards using partner miles, it will mean I will have more opportunity to trade my AM miles with these people at an extra premium due to the shortage of award supply, fine by me.

There are many CC that offer AM miles here, you ought to do your homework a little better.