Originally Posted by
Dr. HFH
Ah, I see your point. But still, I assume, much less than losing paying passengers to another carrier.
Of course, no doubt about that.
But done right, there are still significant advantages of people crediting to your own FFP: It is the cheapest way to handle FF bonusses, you provide a strong incentive to favor your airline over competitors, and last but not least, you receive money from people crediting other flights to your program.
QRPChad understandable balancing issues. It has never been particularly good value for regular tickets, but with some promotions, its value went through the roof. The most extreme example was likely Sake fare, a real long haul C flight plus 90k Qmiles for 600€. And while this might have been an error fare, all those offers like EU-BKK plus 80k Qmiles for 1100€ weren't.
Of course this isn't financially sustainable. But instead of fine tuning it to provide the intended incentives, they just devalued the whole program. It is now horrible value under regular circumstances while offering possibly decent value with some promotions. However, it's those regular cases that makes them money. And with the latest changes, they totally killed any incentive for passengers to use QRPC that way. From my point of view they are destroying important assets instead of optimizing them. I cannot see how this change won't hurt QR financially in the long run.