Xiaotung

Logically yes since the programme is revenue based but you would find it too easy to obtain status when flying Business and too hard when flying Economy. Since Business and Economy have completely different margins, you can never base qualification simply by exact dollar spent. Not only that. The margins between short and long haul are again different. Perhaps your proposal would only work if an airline operate in a single market, eg short haul low cost airlines. That's why, if I understand correctly, even UA changed their programme to revenue based their Premier qualification requirements have not changed.

At the end of the day, a loyalty programme is about how to get your repeated business not about giving you a fixed percentage of your fares back. I still believe distance based programmes give airlines enormous flexibility and make the most sense from attracting and retaining loyalty point of view. It's unfortunate that US airlines have followed the path of NZ thinking that's how one of the most profitable airlines is doing it so it's worth a try. But the reality is NZ has monopoly in most of its markets and it's not going to matter however you change your FFP. Whether it can be replicated in the US remains to be seen.

sbiddle

Not necessarily, no. But there shouldn't be the big discrepancies in SP earn that there are.

You can spend $1188 tomorrow flying AKL-IVC return and only get 66 SP for that. Why get fewer SP spending more money?

If there weren't all the loopholes and exploits in the system it would be a lot fairer.

AndrewAndDebbie

No, but the sale fares get absurdly low amounts. Earn on an Economy sale fare is almost zero.

On a recent flight where we had a successful one-up to PE I got 32 status points and 13 APD. At that rate it would only take 15 Lon-Lax segments to get to silver.




I have looked at what the competition offer. If this is getting off topic, my apologies to the mods. I'm not sure if I should be discussing other FF programs in this forum.


In my mind VS is the closest competitor to NZ on the London to Los Angeles route.

On VS W,S,K and H PE fares earn 150% Delta MQMs. H fares are around the same price as an A fare on NZ. That works out to 4 LHR-LAX segments for Delta silver. They also earn 125% or 150% sky miles depending on fare class.

But you need 5 segments on VS in the K and H fare buckets to make VS silver with limited benefit.

If I was choosing based on FF program, we'd be flying on VS and earning on DL.
Most years we'd both make silver on Delta.


https://www.delta.com/content/www/en...-atlantic.html



In terms of miles per dollar spent, Delta used to be one of the best. DL gave full miles even on the bottom bucket T fares. That just changed and miles on DL transatlantic economy are massively nerfed to 5 miles per USDollar. In my mind that is one more reason to avoid Delta.

serfty

Maybe you could "Move" to the South West Pacific and join Virgin Australia Velocity - you can then credit travel on NZ, SQ, Virgin America, DL (and VA) to Velocity.

Status is much easier to earn (although you do need a minimum number of VA marketed eligible flights 2 for Silver, 4 for Gold ....).

KiwiJC

Keep in mind that One-Up'd (and equally, RU'd) tickets only earn at the rate of the original booked fare, so while you might pay a significant amount for that one-up you will not get any additional SP/AP for it. I'm sure the price you paid for a sale economy fare + one up was still substantially less than a full price A class fare though.

If you compare like for like, the calculator (which admittedly I don't have a huge amount of faith in) indicates that an A class PE fare earns 85 APD and 93 SP, so 4-5 LHR - LAX flights to get NZ*S. Pretty much the same as the alternatives on that route (at least for status earn) based on your figures above.

SeaProf

The calculator is accurate for those numbers based on my experience on that route.

AndrewAndDebbie

It is 5 LHR-LAX segments on an A fare. For us, that means 3 round trips to the US in a 12 month period. Debbie has only done that once since we moved to the UK in 2008.

93 * 4 = 372.
93 * 5 = 465.

In the last 12 months, we flew one PE segment in the higher O fare bucket earning us 123 status points.

(93 * 3) + 132 = 402. Four segments are still not enough to reach NZ*S. Not even enough to maintain silver.

(93 * 2) + (123 * 2) = 432. Nope.

93 + (123 * 3) = 462. 3 O fare segments + 1 A fare will do it.



Under the current rules, we can get DL silver in two round trips on VS on the lowest sale fare. That's about Ł1000 less in spend.


Since Debbie will have NZ*S we will probably stick to NZ and *A parters for now. Might even go to New Zealand. I hate to admit but we've never been.

Next year I'm going to revisit VS. They are retiring their 747s. I'll have to look at reviews of the new hard product.

I'll look into Velocity too. I know a few people living in Oz. Maybe they have an address I can use.

jawnbc

Airpoints sucks; we can all agree on that, right? Except perhaps from NZ's perspective: they have near monopolies on a few key routes (North America; some islands), so they don't have to be as competitive at a FQTV plan.