I just wanted to let you know that Air Berlin might cancel the benefit of free rebooking for Silver and Gold card holders after 31. Dec. 2007. (Evidence was on their website for a few days)

I think one reason is to make the new flex fares more attractive, because otherwise they do not make any sense (far too expensive).

The other reason is that they finally might have realized that a lot of people just use vouchers (Rafaello etc.) to book flights 6 month ahead for 29 EUR. In conjunction with Zanox it looks like this then:

29 Eur oneway flight
-10 Eur discount voucher
-8 Eur Zanox discount
= 11 Eur per oneway

I was wondering over the last years how they can afford this. I still remember the times where you could change the name for free without paying the fare difference.

Furthermore I heart that since Jan 2007 award seats have different availability compared to revenue seats.

In my opinion the TOP Bonus program will loose a lot of its benefits in the next year. I think the next step will be to charge taxes for award flights.