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Thread: How did you choose your FFP? (Survey)
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Old Mar 26, 2019 | 6:04 pm
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GrayAnderson
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Originally Posted by Qwkynuf
Why wouldn't convenience be the number one factor? I would chance a guess that in the US, a majority doesn't fly out of one of the few major, international, non-fortress-hub airports. I get that you have a lot of choices flying out of JFK or LAX, but someone who lives in Dallas or Atlanta or Chicago or San Francisco has many fewer reasonable options.

In smaller markets, there can definitely be logical reasons to choose one airline over the others. In Bellingham, WA (BLI), you can choose from Alaska, Sun Country, or Allegiant. I know which of those I would choose when traveling on business.

For myself, my nearest airport offers the choice of AA, UA, DL, AS, WN, F9, NK, AC, HA, and SY. My job generally involves flying to somewhere in the US every Monday morning and returning either Thursday or Friday evening. Since I go to different places every week and could be in any state, that pretty much eliminates Frontier, Spirit, Hawaiian, Air Canada, and Sun Country. Of the remaining 5, Alaska simply doesn't go where I need to, when I get much east of the Rocky Mountains. Southwest gives me plenty of destinations, but mostly with unusable connection schedules.

That leaves the "big 3". For the times that I fly - typically between 6 and 7am on a Monday, UA has flights departing for SFO, DEN, and EWR. AA has direct flights to LAX and DFW. Delta, on the other hand, has flights to SEA, LAX, SLC, ATL, MSP, and JFK. So, I joined the Delta SkyMiles program because they can get me where I need to go.
Cost is another possible issue. For example, it is all well and good to have 500 flights per day from my airport to various places on Airline X...but if I have to "pay" for that in the form of an extra $25-50/flight I might pick Airline Y (with a known quantity connection and a half-dozen flights per day on that route).

Edit:
One problem that I will say applies with most FFPs is the lack of overt benefits for paid F pax. The ability to comp-up is gone (since we're already bumped up), we don't get more "bang for our buck" in RDMs in a sense, and so on. DL, at least, offers a tangibly flexible free SDC benefit. But that's one reason that most of the "tangible" benefits relating to my flight(s) are mostly pointless.
Last edited by GrayAnderson; Mar 26, 2019 at 11:26 pm
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