Originally Posted by
OH-LGG
For years I've been of the opinion that the Platinum is too easy to achieve. Yesterday, this was suddenly supported by a random conversation with the flight attendant that would point out that so many Platinums on their flights nowadays and its good to see a new Lumo tier.
This made me think is it wise to have so many Platinums and at the same time anyone can get now Gold card without flying.
Situation now is: too many Plats and too many Golds.
Was this on a flight from/to OUL?
OUL seems to have some sort of frequent flyer distortion field going on or something as it's not uncommon to have 10+ plat and 20+ golds per flight, especially on the morning flights from OUL and afternoon flights to OUL.
Originally Posted by
intuition
A newly baked silver needs to add 26 more segments or 50 000 points to get to gold. However, compensating for the tier bonus of 10%, it is only 45 455 points effort, as 4545 points are added for free.
Adding 26 segments on top of the already done 20 segments, is an extra 130% effort. (You need to fly another 26/20=130% segments).
Adding 45 455 points on top of the 30 000 the silver already has is an added 152% effort.
Going from Gold to Plat is a much lesser added effort. Still, the pointer needs 76% more while the segmenter needs 65%.
And going from plat to lumo is the most unequal leap. The segmenter does not even need to double his flying (+97%) while the pointer needs to add 160% more flights.
When dealing with the lower levels I can agree with you that getting status is easier with segments than points. But after we're getting into certain thresholds, it's not simple math anymore. I would argue that 150 segments per year is much more
effort than 450k points per year. Is it as much value to company? Maybe, maybe not, but as an effort to one flying, I have hard time seeing how less than one round trip LH J in a month would be more effort. 150 segments is on average 3 flights every week of the year. Each and every week. For short term that's not bad, but whole year, it's a lot. If the segments and points would scale linear and the requirement would be 225 segments, it would be in the borderline of impossible.
I'm guessing, that Finnair has looked at the statistics on how many points or segments top flier in the program fly and adjusted the levels as such. Personally I was a bit surprised when Plat requirement was lowered to 76 segments, but I'm guessing there is just so many more people getting to over the threshold with points rather than segments. And extreme segment runners will always be tiny minority of Plats/Lumos even if they're more represented in this forum. While I would not make Lumo points only, I could see some sort of double requirement like 150k points and 150 segments vs. only 150 segments. But even with that, I'm not sure if that would exclude more than few persons so doing it would be more or less pointless.
And in the end of the day, I think if the qualification requirements don't produce overpopulation on certain tiers, then they're ok. At current time what I'm only seeing is crowding of the lounge, but even that can't be wholly blamed on too many golds/plats. Since last lounge renovation, Finnair's passenger numbers have seen a huge increase and that's also driving up the lounge utlization/crowding in addition to more tier members.