AF's strategic goals for La Premiere in light of its recent changes for awards
 

Just received an email with confirmation of the rumored and now confirmed new limitations for P awards, with typical BS PR spin.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...3e0dfc7880.png

So Platinum can still redeem, but only one seat available per flight…so no flights with your SO for you. This is really petty…

They should be ashamed considering the already poor redemption scheme in miles when flying AF/KL.

Oh well, I bet it's the first step, the next would be to increase the redemption rate...

Received the same e-mail, and I agree that limiting LP award space to one seat per flight is very "mesquin" indeed!

Does this mean reservations will be limited starting 1/1/2023 or effective today for flights departing on or after 1/1/2023?

In any case, I just got a reservation in for next September (for two pax as a lowly gold…!). The website wouldn’t go through to the payment page but created the PNR so I called to have it manually processed. Tickets have been issued - I hope they don’t touch it.

I read it as saying that reservations will be limited starting 1/1/2023. Your reservations should be fine.

On the other hand, I really don't know how to interpret that last sentence: "All existing reservations in La Première will be unaffected, however any changes made to reservations after 1 January 2023 will be subject to the new rules in place at that time."

🤔​​​​​​​🤔

I guess you won't be allowed to modify an existing reservation

That's exactly how I read it.

Does this mean “upgrade in advance” is also toast for golds?

While I have no doubt the new P cabin will be top notch, making such a move for a product not even built yet, it feels like the same PR B...t Skytrax used to rank LH a 5* airline when they introduced their new J.

Given the change to minimum required elite level for LP booking AND the restriction of the number of seats available for award redemption, do you think this implies that the LP cabin seat count is going to be reduced from 4 to 3 when the new product is introduced later this year?

I wonder if they're also doing this because a lot of people are actually paying for P. But regardless, I agree with others that this is quite cheap from Air France. I "understand" if they want to limit P awards to Platinum (I'm Gold so that is affecting me, but I still can see where they're coming from), but the fact that they are limiting awards to 1 seat, effectively preventing their most loyal customers to redeem miles for themselves and significant others, is really not customer friendly at all.

Also surprised they're mentioning their new La Premiere cabin when it's not even been formally introduced!?

It shows that the original Frequent Flyer programs as built in the early 2000s, based on availability depending on the loading rate (day/seasons) was quite the right approach.
Over the years, they tried to tweak the system with various waves of changes (or “evolutions”), but the programs have now completely lost their philosophy and simplicity .

Indeed, I can understand that they want to limit P award tickets considering the low P offer vs increasing demand.

However, limiting P award to only 1 seat and preventing top clients to travel with their partner is a cheap move !
As for my case, I travel around 70/80 flights per year, only in J or P (around 6 to 7 round trip flights per year).
With over 2 M. miles, I would be a potential client to use them in P award tickets but I won't be allowed any longer...

In addition, 2 P award tickets would require at least 1 M. miles so I'm not sure they are so many eligible clients...

I think there are a lot of Americans with a ton of Citi/Amex/Chase/Capital One points. Ease of accruing these points make it possible for high spenders to quickly end up with 7 and even 8-figure point balances in these currencies, and there are frequent point transfer bonuses to Flying Blue. It's not terribly difficult to accrue FB Gold (or even Plat) status while spending little time on the plane, especially with the ability to earn XP with credit cards, donating miles to charity, or spending money on reforestation. I would posit that with so few LP seats in the air, the proportion of the LP seats being redeemed by flyers who spend very little time on AF/KL revenue flights has passed the level they're willing to tolerate. Instead of limiting LP redemptions to 1 seat/flight though, I think a better course would be to release the seats closer to travel, as it becomes clear/highly likely they will not be sold. From SFO it's 230k each way to Europe in LP, and I'd think that whatever they're getting paid by Citi/Amex/Chase/Capital One for those points should easily cover the cost of transporting passengers in an otherwise empty seat (of which there have been very few recently IME).