Often it's what they don't say...
 

Just got the "Altitude Report" e-mail today. One article with a link is titled "Rouge Means Go" and reassures the reader that we can "Enjoy the priority travel services and privileges you're used to when you fly with Air Canada rouge, including priority check-in and airport lounge access. Lower prices with the same high level of service - can't be beat."

Click on the link and it says

"All members will earn Altitude Qualifying Miles (AQM) and Altitude Qualifying Segments (AQS) when purchasing a Flex, Latitude or Premium rouge fare on flights operated by Air Canada rouge."

Makes you feel all warm inside that AC is preserving all of our top tier benefits as they launch Rogue.

For most AE members, they'll probably have no idea that they will earn a tiny fraction of the AQM's they used to earn on the equivalent AC flight until they fly and look at their accumulation records.

A little more honesty in how we are communicated with would be aprpeciated.

A little more honesty? Really? Aren't your expectations kind of high?

I think the person doing the all-caps subject line accurately captured my feelings of the program. it's like being yelled at.

Also got to love the favourite tweets section:

@BrettDGagnon
oh #aircanada say it ain't so, 3, THREE ontime pushbacks in a row, good on ya, nice trending!

Personally, if I was chronically late, I wouldn't be too impressed with an improvement in my OTP. An on time pushback should be the norm, not the exception.

Obviously the spin doctors are not the same people who will end up dealing with irate customers who feel they were misled.

At the end of the day some honesty might actually do them some good? But no, arrogance is alive and strong. They are smart and customers are stupid obviously.

For a while after Calin took over, things looked like going in the right direction. But now it seems the good old corporate culture, whereby the customer is the enemy, seems to be back in full force. Oh well.

I am looking at this itinerary:
YVR-YYZ-VCE
ATH-YYZ-YVR
(Italics are premium rouge, the YYZ-YVR routes are mapped into latitude on standard flights)

I should receive the following for AQMs:
2078 YVR-YYZ
2800 YYZ-VCE
2800 ATH-YYZ
2078 YYZ-YVR

Right?

Cheers

Intentional misspelling? ;)

The other weird/misleading thing about that email?

On the right hand side it shows for me:

ALTITUDE QUALIFYING MILES*
9628

Altitude qualifying SEGMENTS*
5

*As of April 30

And then it encourages me to log into my Dashboard. It then shows my real totals of 36000 AQM and 16 AQS. It appears it is showing me my "Air Canada metal" miles and segments in the email but that isn't noted/explained anywhere. Took me a couple of minutes to figure that out.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.448 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

In his defense he only asked for a *little* more honesty.

CRAZY!

That's two more minutes than I spent after I noticed the totals were wrong. Thanks. :)

It shows me at 7799 and I'm at 73,545

Browsing on the ITA software, the difference between YVR-YYZ-VCE Rouge vs YVR-YYZ-FRA-VCE on AC/LH mainline was about $50 difference, less all those AQM's.

Certainly not super amounts of difference...

I agree. Perhaps in a slowing economy and more aggressive competition from WJ they might just change their arrogant atttitude of "we can do whatever the heck we want; screw the customer". I'm a loyal kind of OP but loyalty is based on experience for dollars spent. It has been terrible of late.

AC must have hired a VP to find every which way to annoy TTs. The fiddling he/she has been doing with status miles over the past year just plain irritates. Have they thought of closing down their FF program completely? They will save piles of money and make their billions catering for the millions who don't care or know about FF including the high value pax who buys J