Originally Posted by
Harper50505
I did wonder last night whether with changing the criteria for qualification, A3 have missed a trick here.
It's now going to be 12 sectors for gold but they value all those sectors in exactly the same way so a sector in Y on the cheapest ticket from ATH-JMK, a twenty minute flight is valued as exactly the same as a sector in business on a flexible ticket between ATH-ARN/OSL/EDI and a few more places in Northern Europe. The spend on these sectors is obviously hugely different but maybe the trick should have been sectors in business equal two sectors in economy without making it all too complicated.
I understand what you write, but I can't quite get what you are saying...
The requirement is a
combo of segments and tier points, so while a segment is a segment is a segment, someone flying 12 segments on the cheapest ticket on the shortest route willl likely not meet the requirement in points. They won't qualify because they failed the second part of the combo.
Thus, there is a difference in valuation of the segments, just not in the way you might be thinking of it.
These combo-requirements came about not for the purpose of valuating and promoting segment running per se, but to balance the requirements between a domestic-only flyer and and a internationally-only flyer. The 12k points were a decently high bar for someone flying mostly inside Greece, while it was really easy to reach flying internationally and longhaul.
So, the combo-requirement is not aiming to award anyone based on taking X number of valuable flights, it is to create a path to Gold for one group of members that has a "difficulty" on par with the path domestic flyers have to Gold. And now they just re-calibrated this again, thinking 4 segments were too few and 12 is the right amount, balancing the difficulty between different groups of members/flyers.
Interestingly enough, Aegean now introduced a third path, with segment as only qualifier, something they never had before. So then, would it be valid to count segments differently? Eg all business segment counts with factor 2x?
It is not an unreasonable idea, 32 shorthaul flights eg ATH-SKG in economy might generate less profit for Aegean than 32 longhaul in business flex. But in reality it might be more complicated than that. A longhaul business saver ticket might generate less than a shorthaul comfort flex. There have been programs that had a COS-factor on segments, but I haven't seen it in a long time. In fact, I've seen multiple programs scrapping the segment-only requirement altogether.
So this path should probably be seen as a way to value frequency, no matter how much or little it earns to the company. The path is not aimed at everyone, it is like a catch-all thing that "if you don't reach gold by any of the other means and still fly very frequently, we are going to give you gold anyway".