Originally Posted by DHAST
NOW you guys are starting to understand what it's like having your airline employee travel benefits jerked around or limited or what have you... When I frequented the UA board in my UAX days, all of us were quite frequently blasted over our travel benefits and what classes or service we "should" or "shouldn't" be permitted to sit in.
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The truth of the matter is that it is a benefit negotiated by BOTH corporate travellers and airline employees...
Take a few deep breaths, relax, calm down ...
The fact of the matter is that FF programs are not a "benefit." They're a marketing program devised and adminstered by airlines to increase customer loyalty. Their purpose is not to reward past behavior, though that's what they do. It's to encourage future behavior. The minute they stop doing that, they're out the window in a heartbeat.
An airline and company can agree that the company will receive discounts if it puts all or most of its travel on the airline. At that point the airline no longer has to encourage the company's employees to use it. The company takes care of that. The FF program is therefore, in terms of its original intent, useless. The downside to the airline is that, by removing something frequent travelers have come to expect, it will incur ill-will. That will show up in several ways: resentment and demotivation, avoiding beneficial but optional travel, avoiding the airline when employees have a choice, "proving" that using a different airline is "necessary" for a specific trip, bad PR for the company, and so on up to good people quitting. It's hard to measure the bottom-line damage all these do, but one can't deny that they exist.
This has nothing to do with airline employees. It's a matter of airlines starting the game and making the rules. We try to learn the rules and play the game as well as we can. The airlines created the monster. Now they have to live with it.