Originally Posted by
jashah
Given the limitations with the WestJet Rewards program, has anyone used the AF/KLM Flying Blue program to accumulate rewards while flying on WS? Is this worthwhile?
The answer depends on so many questions. How much do you fly? Where do you fly? What fares do you buy?
The earnings for crediting WS flights to FB are not spectacular. If you have no status with WS, yeah, 0.5% in WSD is crappy, but if you fly enough even to achieve Silver, you get to 3%, and higher status gets you more WSD.
If you're not flying much, the earn rate on WSD may be poor without status, but at least it's transparent and you can redeem them after only racking up 15 WSD. And the WS World Elite MasterCard is a decent card that makes it easy to accumulate WSD. You can argue that you might earn a bit better value with FB miles, but it might take you a long time to accumulate enough to do much with. For example, a $300 base fare YYC-YYZ would only earn 2 WSD (I think they'd round up from 1.5, but maybe not), worth C$2, but even on a 20% earning fare at FB, would earn 334 miles that are worth about 1.2 cents (US), according to TPG's monthly valuation, which would be worth about C$5.
But there are limited ways to earn FB miles in Canada - basically just transferring from Marriott. So unless you're doing a bunch of international travel and racking up FB miles on SkyTeam partners and/or from foreign credit cards, it may be hard to accumulate enough miles to do much with. Even for a short-haul Y reward YYC-YVR at 11.5K miles, you need to fly 35 of those 334-mile tickets.
If you fly a lot, how much of your flying is domestic vs international? And what fares? WS status has a lot of benefits beyond the higher WSD earn rate, so if you're mostly flying within Canada, you may be missing out on a bunch of valuable benefits. If you're flying a lot internationally, you may find status with AF/KL to be more useful to you, since you have proper status with the SkyTeam alliance as opposed to WS's half-baked web of partnerships. And having miles at FB will probably give you access to more interesting redemption opportunities than WSD.
Anyway, it's really hard to give you a more precise answer based on the very little info you've shared, but if you live in Canada (as your profile suggests), it's likely not a slam dunk to move over to FB.