For those of you who travel on VIA Rail often enough to bother with its VIA Preference program (slogan: "Mostly Harmless"), there are a bunch of changes to the program coming up as of 27 May.

There is so much irrelevant bafflegab here that it's hard to tell which changes are really significant, but as far as I can see, the two that will have the biggest practical impact - and which will make VIA Preference more like an airline FFP - are:

1. You will now have to pay a $$ fee ("taxes") to redeem points. (top of page 12)
2. Rewards will now have dynamic pricing. (page 11)

I suppose we won't find out how these work out in practice until the end of May, but my guess is:

1. The "tax" on redemptions will be calculated based on the very highest possible cash fare for the train and COS.
2. The dynamic pricing will result in most redemptions requiring more points than they do now.

The latter in particular would really lower the value of the program, which lay mostly in being able to book flat-rate redemptions at the last minute on trains where fares are prohibitive.

Anyhow, now that VIA have apparently mastered the technology of dynamic reward pricing, maybe one of these days they'll get around to figuring out some way of letting us choose our own seats.

Not part of the program changes as such, but I also note that the Premier status benefit coupons for this status year (which started yesterday) are distinctly lousier than in the past. The "use 50% fewer points on a redemption" options were generally the best deal, and now they're gone. The "instantly earn x free points" options are still there, but the rest are all insulting little 20% discounts on $$ fares. Very poor stuff.

I'm thinking of cashing in all my coupons for the instant points and then burning up all the points in my account before May 27, since I'm assuming redemptions will get more expensive after that.