Does $$$ in your bank account go up because of inflation?

It's that way in life for everything. Not saying it's right, just the way things work.

Amid all the doom & gloom about the imminent massive devaluation of Cathay Pacific's MPC going the way of SQ PPS and with it, the destruction of Asia Miles for months and months, it turned out the announced revamped MPC is nothing at all like the apocalypse that people were expecting it to be.

Cathay Pacific Marco Polo Club revamped

If anything, it will take less flying to reach top tier status as long as you fly premium fares and CX is introducing the equivalent of SWUs for CX Diamond members.

Yet many doomsayers have been telling us it's only a matter of time that AA, AS and other OW associated airlines go bust and turned into DL/UA #2. JL had their "devaluation" this year but the only devaluation is only certain times of the week during busier days, as long as you stay out of those days, your mileage cost has not gone up at all. In return, they now permit one-way awards at 50% of RT and their award charts are consistently among the lowest of the industry, 32K to fly intra-China in F/J (PEK-SHA-PEK) for example whereas Aeroplan will charge you 110K.

Even the much feared SQ PPS assimilation, not only it didn't happen, people also forgot that Kris Flyer in fact has a fairly competitive reward chart because you get 15% off everything on it as long as you fly solely on SQ. And the stopover rule is very generous, you can have as many as you want at reasonable cost. With SQ staying put, there is no way CX will hike Asia Miles requirement in the way Aeroplan has been doing. All CX customers need to do is to look around and they see JL staying put, SQ staying put, AA is still very attractive and AS is interesting too.

It turns out, Aeroplan is quite alone in trying to mimic Delta and United but apparently, the industry is not taking the cue from them and nobody seriously believe two mediocre US airlines can successfully use the revenue based model as if it is a SQ or EK. As it turned out, United CEO is already out of a job. Sure it wasn't all about its FFP but there is no denial that UA is in turmoil for the poor decisions it made in the past 2 years even though U.S. economy is doing fairly well.

Flawed comparison. Suppose the bank promises 100$ to those who deposit 1000$ over a year in their account, at the end of the year the bank could not say: ok, due to inflation, we will give you 90$ instead of 100$.

and...if you keep your money in the account more than a year without spending it, we'll just keep it all, but then you can buy it back for $750

There is not one FF program that promises you anything in the future, like a banks interest. Bank do how ever change the service fees on the deposit with little notice.

I was replying to your inflation argument with an inflation example. I could not expect that the topic would suddenly shift to... to what exactly? Banking fees?

the point people were making was your analogy was stupid and not applicable.

I agree with you.

However, I think the problem is that most people do not earn miles from flying.

I really think there need to be two types of miles. One lets you redeem for a large group of flights, the other lets you redeem for a subset of those flights.

Like how SEs can book into R or I, but anyone else can just do I. But instead of SEs, anyone using "AQM" can book into a better class.

And because AQM come around from actual revenue to the airlines, there's an incentive for this. The 3cpm miles let you book more than the 1cpm miles.

The inflation argument makes no sense with regards to earned miles unless the distance flown also increases with the CPI as well.

Of course the elephant in the room is that a lot of AP points don't come from miles flown but from CC spend, where inflation means that you do earn more points relative to the actual items purchased for the most part, so those points do have a lowering value overtime. It is hard to justify the magnitude of those increases in recent years, at least relative to real inflation. We are talking about AC though so shouldn't be surprised at all.

So you're saying AP should rebrand "market price reward flights" as "status reward flights"? I'd be okay with that, honestly. Just price the second type the same (ish) as the current fixed rewards and not as outrageous as market price. Would certainly be an interesting and unique concept to reward ACTUAL flyers with "guaranteed" seats.

For such "status" or "flying/travel partner" miles, the charts should be rolled back to where they were in the early 90s. Using true FF miles for true awards, is where it should be at. Possibly allow a certain number of other partner miles if you have status (similar to how there is no co-pay for SE on eUPs), and maybe start YQ after that.

For the rest of the peeps who collect miles churning credit cards, they can put whatever kind of award chart out there, but be honest about YQ (or list fixed YQ as they list fixed mileage now).

wow, this is retarded. cant believe Asia 1 is going from 30K to 80K.. since when does anything go up more than 100% in one go? Aeroplan, you suck

As AC apparently charge AP shouldn't that be AC you suck.

Maybe we missed the point of all of this:

Perhaps AC only wants to fill the planes with seats that are paid for with actual dollars, not our Aeroplan miles and eUpgrades, which are a different currency.

We may believe that the miles we earned flying in those paid seats is worth something. With AP (AC) now having such large increases in miles needed, your miles in "the bank" are technically worth less as you now have to use more of them to buy the same flights.

I recall having some conversations a number of months ago where I said that although Aeroplan miles are not bananas and won't "go bad" anytime soon, they are not going to be worth more next year.

I am sure many of you thought the same thing. So here we are.

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