<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Globaliser:
But this may just be economic sense taking priority over the nostalgic "principled" basis of the alliance. It's going to make no difference to the pax who consistently flies premium classes, the profitable end of the market for all alliance carriers. And the discount economy pax who is thinking of jumping ship may think again when they realise that the options will sometimes be between OW in which they have to choose between earning full miles in one scheme and discounted miles in another, and Star in which (like the SQ examples you give) they will earn no miles in any.</font>
I agree with this.
It might be over-simplifying things a bit, but to me there are three different categories of flyers. (1) The "elite elites" who fly on premium fares - none of the changes will negatively impact them, so the airlines have looked after them; (2) Those who only fly say once a year to visit family, or 3 domestics per year, get a lot of points from program partners, and maybe travel on points every few years - for them, the changes also won't make much difference. They don't sit tallying their points each week, have no real EXPECTATION of an upcoming award, and consequently look for the cheapest fares with points or not. IMHO this is the exact group that the airlines had in mind when they reduced points/miles; then (3) The mid-tier who fly say 40-80K mi per year, have some elite status, accumulate points with some speed and maybe use their points on an award yearly - these are the ones who it seems really get burned with the changes, see the example above.
You are correct that a lot of this is driven by "economic reality", and as I mentioned before, I think the principle of reduced (or no) miles does make lots of sense.
Economic reality may also dictate some refinements in the implementation to remove some of the "glitches" identified above - I don't know exactly what percentage of flyers fit into each of my artificial categories, but probably the percentage of revenue airlines derive from the third category is not insignificant.
Maybe, as you pointed out, the marketplace will forgive OW for this problem of non-uniformity if there are LOTS of fares that earn no miles on *A and their relative prices. OTOH, if *A strike the right balance with miles vs non-mile fares, and the percentage of travellers with miles scattered over OW is high, then OW could be in trouble.
Just as a final example, I looked at SQ fares SIN-MEL for without/with miles and the price difference was about 25%. For QF (earning AA miles) it was 40%.
Ultimately the marketplace DOES help sort these things out. I just wish OW could have got a bit closer to the target on their first attempt... *A seems to be a few steps ahead in terms of the FF plans right now.