FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Independent & Objective FF Award Availability Index

Jun 23, 2004 | 12:16 pm

#4

MileKing

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Quote:

Originally Posted by BearX220

A lot of us have anecdotes about terrible FF award availability, and they have seeded widely held beliefs: CO is awful, UA is pretty good, AA is getting worse, etc. But so far as I know there's no authoritative data-gathering exercise which measures the situation on a per-airline basis. I propose inventing one.

I would like to develop a fair and rigorous survey methodology to poll major US airlines' FF award availability. The goal is to publish a quarterly (or even monthly) index/ranking of airlines, showing how accessible their "standard" awards really are.

Look at gas prices. Everyone has anecdotes about how it's $2.55 here, $2.25 there, etc., but they don't add up to a market survey. For that you need Dan Lundberg, who brings a proven methodology to the price watch. We don't have a Dan Lundberg in the FF field... so maybe we can become the equivalent.

Some of the factors that would go into designing a survey methodology:

** How many airlines would we survey? I'd propose ranking all the US carriers offering online award search tools.

** How many random city pairs per airline would constitute a fair "core sample"? I'd propose 100.

** What timeframe between search date and travel date should we specify? Because anecdotes suggest the availability pictures changes as a travel date nears, I propose trying at least two timeframes: maybe 10 days out and 120 days out.

** Would we attempt to weight our "test city pairs" so we manufacture a mix of leisure and business destinations, foreign and domestic destinations, hub and multi-segment trips? Or just let random probability work its will?

** I propose we have non-elites survey standard award availability in all classes.

I think an index/ranking would interest not just FTers but the press and maybe universities. Lots of schools issue vague customer satisfaction rankings of airlines based on soft factors. This index would be about data.

I'm an ex-journalist, now a writer and information designer, and I'd like to have a crack at this -- but I need some help and would like the community to comment on/propose revisions to the methodology ideas above.

Anybody want to play?

Incredible! Count me in. I was thinking the exact same thing this morning and was trying to gather my thoughts for a post. I planned on calling it the "Great CO Award Availability Study" in deference to the pathetic availabilty of standard award seats on that airline, but clearly other airlines should be included.

My view is that a random city pair sample is not the best approach. For any particular airline, we would want to focus on "prime" frequent flyer award redemption routes. I'm sure most people are much more interested in CO award availability from EWR to HNL than they are for EWR to Cleveland. I propose we poll people on popular routes for each airline and go with the top hitters. I would also suggest that we not limit the study to non-elites, but that we attempt to secure volunteers at all levels so we can see the impact being elite has/does not have on award availability.

The most troublesome issue is how far out to check. Again, I believe we need a range of times starting at 330 days and moving down to 1 day in advance at 60-90 day intervals (less as you get closer in). We also need to establish guidelines for how the availability check is to be performed and when, i.e., all checks done on-line at Noon each day, so we have a rough comparison standard across airlines.

Also, we will need to have multiple and staggered start dates as we are all aware that availability varies significantly by day of week. For example, if someone started checking 330 days out from today (somewhere around May 21, 2005 which is a Saturday, we would also need someone to check identical routings for Mondays and maybe a mid-week day as well. The logisitics of how this works will need to be agreed upon, but I believe we can come up with a workable solution. Thoughts?

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