FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Finnair Plus will get ”fantastic new improvements”
Old Jan 12, 2018, 4:02 am
  #19  
intuition
Moderator, Finnair
 
Join Date: May 2011
Location: MMX (CPH)
Programs: Eurobonus Diamond, QR Gold, AY+ Platinum, A3*G, Nordic Choice Lifetime Platinum, SJ Prio Black
Posts: 14,182
If you shift how the loyalty tiers are earned, you shift the focus and the memberbase of the program. The question is if that will help AY earn more money.

Which tickets would earn most "loylaty-points" in the system suggested above? Longhaul from HEL and shorthaul business class. So you will tilt the AY+ member base to be dominated by this geography/demography.
But Finns are already loyal to AY. Why do you think a longhaul ticket ex-HEL cost 4000€? Because the local market accepts it. So what good does it do to have all your high tier members in HEL area? The catchment area for HEL is maybe 1 million people. Are there enough Nyland people for Finnair to live on?

Contries/marketing areas where purchasing power is lower than in Finland has "cheaper" tickets (PPP) and thus would have fewer tier members. You can't sell 4000€ tickets in Hungary for instance, so very few people there will climb the tiers. Won't the program fail to offer incentive in low PPP areas, where people also have a lot of choices besides an obscure airline from some snowy country?

And why should the thousands and thousands of salarymen flying daily/weekly between STO and HEL in the back of the bus stick with AY that no longer rewards their loyalty, because they "only" spend 69€ on the ticket? D8/DY will be laughing all the way to the bank, when they sell 59€ tickets and get 100% loadfactor.


My take, without knowing the specific numbers, is that such changes won't benefit AY.
intuition is offline