Or, judging by the huge line of people using the J-line, is CX willing to lose 80% of them (status Y fliers)? Those lines at non-status Y won't look so "huge" when all of a sudden you lose the people in the J line. FT is a highly skilled sample of experienced fliers that actually been to the trenches, talk to the front line people, and career businessmen that makes good analytical arguments and discussions.

Very true. My company finally pays Y+ and CX pulls a stunt like this. Even as Y flier I avg. $2000 USD per trip (due to multiple hops) at $20,000 from tix revenue. Then my family of four's annual summer trip cost about $8000, so that's $28,000. Then my spending in-flight purchase which is $5000 per year for a total of $33,000. Not to mention I'm a CX loyaltist to a point that I market for them, influencing my friends and family to fly CX. If CX thinks a Y-flier like me isn't worth their time to make a point to entice and retain, that's fine. As a "free-agent" I have enough credit cards that gives me most of my perks (lounge, extra baggage, etc.), and frequently I can get J-discount ticket on other airlines that are comparable to Y+ fare.

Most airlines look at the glass upside-down in my opinion. I would think an airline gets enough premium fliers to breakeven, and attracts massive amount of Y fliers to make money. Again, reality don't lie, over the decades people have attempted to start premium-seats only airlines only to die quickly, but Y-seat only airlines flourishes.

I only fly Y with an occasional upgrade to Y+ about 6-7 times a year at between LAX-MNL at about 1300 usd per trip. Add to that 2-3 personal trips with my wife and 1 -2 US vacation trips per year with the whole family, 5 pax.

My loyalty with Cathay will probably end when this change is implemented and its no longer worth it to me to keep using CX and I will switch to PR esp. on the family trips as having the stop over in HKG with young kids in tow has really been a hassle.

Some of the comments seem to echo similar thoughts which followed the "enhancement" (2014) of crediting partner flying with the QF program. A lot of sapphire and (modest level) emerald level flyers indicated transfer of flying (and crediting) to other OW programs or to the best (cheapest) flight of the day. Given that the QF FF program has been touted as one of the more profitable aspects of the company I wonder what the long term effects will be.

And with respect to CX, I wonder whether unintended consequences may surprise some of the analysts who are suggesting the (speculated) changes.

The only prediction that I will make is that blind loyalty and the inertia of not changing are traits which are disappearing.

Happy wandering

Fred

I won't requote your whole thing for brevity purposes, but I respectfully disagree with the analysis, particularly in the context of CX. The operating leverage inherent in an aircraft is why, and the reason it's more pertinent to CX is that CX is not a niche airline like SQ...any Asian airline that manages to fly 4x daily to LAX, 6x daily to the NY area and 5x daily to LHR, etc. etc. has a major issue: how do you fill the seats in the back. The adage "you make all your money up front" glosses over a pretty important point; you need the back to be filled up, and the higher yield you can score down back gives you more breathing room up front. Not to mention as an aside, the 77G - which I'm sure you've flown from YVR - is absolutely not a premium configged plane. Only 40 J, 30 or so Y+, and the rest cattle car in the back. Which makes filling up that bird in the back even more relevant. Selling bottom dweller Y fares to fill up an entire 77G is not going to make the economics work on a route like EWR where the front is filled up with cheaper award travelers in J. You need to capture higher-fare class passengers on that plane in Y.

So this leads to the next point. There are basically two ways to earn high status: Pay a lot and pay less. Lets call pay a lot = "premium flier" and pay less = "economy flier".

Under CX's current regimen, mid/high intensity Premium Fliers can earn Gold or Diamond. Meanwhile, high intensity economy fliers can earn Gold or Diamond. The point being, it's slightly easier to earn Gold or DM if you're a Premium Flier because of the elite bonus. But as you point out, it's not that much of a bonus.

In essence, what Premium Flier DMs may be whinging about is that there is full equality in the system. Economy Fliers and Premium Fliers who have obtained GO or DM get the same benefits. And as all of us can attest from the Wing F lounge, the overall experience is cheapened because there are a lot of people in the system and CX, for whatever reason, won't build bigger lounges or offer nicer services in them. Now, if you're paying $8k USD/year to score DM on cheapo ex-TPE tickets, then you've got a great bargain. But if you spent $100k USD a year you still get that same Wing F experience with lousy wine, subpar dining and massive overcrowding. And you probably feel like you're not getting exclusivity over the cattle car while you have paid such an egregiously higher amount that you should be entitled to it (although, I will mention heavens knows how many of CX's premium DM fliers are 2-3 year stints of guys working at banks, who then transfer out and have no loyalty to CX ever again...that's another topic).

I think what daniellam proposes earlier makes a lot of sense; it won't actually totally cheapen the Economy Fliers' experience - everyone will still get OWE, F lounge access, etc. But there will basically be a tier level or two above that offers more exclusive benefits to the Premium Fliers who spend a lot.

My main point is, it's insane for CX to go the way of SQ's system and say that Y fliers don't matter. Anyone who has studied or worked in an airline for half a day could figure that out. SQ is in a unique situation geographically and niche-wise so they follow a certain path with their FFP. My opinion is CX is going to be a massively relevant carrier for the next many decades, and will need a globally competitive FFP to match. Although the trend globally is to go towards revenue instead of simple butts in seats, Y fliers will still expect a loyalty program or else they can fly other options. And the ME carriers are always there to offer a thorn in everyone else's sides. What danniellam recommends is surprisingly realistic, IMO.

I'd echo some of the thoughts above.

A relatively low yielding DM (CX used almost exclusively for personal travel), I've been doing about 120-150k miles p.a. The soft perks of the MPC have made me pick CX for a fair bit of the flying, despite CX being slightly costlier/inconvenient at times (eg to EU, for a SIN based flyer)..that will probably change if there is a significant dilution of benefits.

Don't get me wrong - I quite like CX and their overall product/ground service - have been a constant 'CX over SQ any day' voter for long. Its just that if things get to a point where I don't see the value of the program to me, I'd walk.

Quite agree with daniellam and QRC3288. Yes there is a need for CX to distinguish its top revenue customers (not just via an unpublished DM+..perhaps a published 'light' version of that). Don't think having a purely revenue based MPC is the best/only way of doing that - OpUp tie-breakers based on CIV scores is a good example - you are taking better care of the higher value pax, but not making the lower value pax feel totally worthless.

I doubt that going the SQ way is going to do CX's bottomline much good - trolling the SQ board/talking to PPS friends, its clear that a lot of their flights (LHR for example) are going very full up front, at very high fares but they just don't seem to be doing anything great financially - I suspect that they are making a lot lesser from Y on their regional routes than what they used to (eg, SQ flights to India, were never less than SGD1200, back in 2005-07, its fairly easy to get them for half that fare now - if anything, competition now is lesser/inferior than back then... partly reduced loyalty to blame?).

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B142 Safari/8536.25)

If she flew with sq, she surely will not be valued

Well, if she flew SQ, she would probably still get the highest tier in their KrisFlyer programme, Elite Gold which is equivalent to Star Alliance Gold. She will still get access to the lounges that Star Gold members get. However, she just won't get access to SQ's exclusive Silver Kris First Class lounge.

If CX's does what I proposed above earlier:

Assuming CX had "Asia Miles Platinum (equivalent to Oneworld Emerald)", the only difference at HKG she will only get access to CX's "First Class" lounges and not the "Diamond Room" [a new lounge created using the current space where the F side of The Wing is?] which would be for CX F passengers and Marco Polo Diamond members (Revenue Based when for those flying in premium cabins) and a step above your regular First Class lounge.

As for non-lounge benefits, those would be the same as would any Oneworld Emerald would have (including greeting by purser when flying Y etc, chance for op-up [based on CIV score of course!]).

I bet this lounge would be filled with Z class PAX redeeming from AA/BA though...

Neither to their Silverkris lounge - only to the much inferior Star Gold lounge in SIN!

Well, that is only assuming that CX opens up Z availability in the first place.

Perhaps CX should offer several more reasonable "A" fares (with advanced 60, 42, 28, 14, 7 day advanced purchase and hefty refund fees) on certain routes and try to sell them for $$$ before offering them as Z fares?

It seems like the only reason why Z availability is plenty may be due to artificially high F fares on routes such as JFK-HKG vv. (and this route seems to be easy to get Z at certain times). Sometimes I see F6 A0 on the a flight where Z class is available!

Since CX us now using Amadeus as their reservations system, they can perhaps implement "point of sale availability" for Z class and restrict availability to their own Asia Miles / Marco Polo Club members. If those seats get unredeemed then they would get released to Oneworld members.

As far as the lounge arrangements, the system proposed sounds very similar to BA. BA Gold (Emerald) have access to the Galleries First lounge while actual First Class passengers get access to the Concorde Room. BA Gold members who accumulate 5,000 tier points can redeem access to the Concorde Room.

There's going to be an article in Sunday's SCMP on this.. watch for it.

Exclusive? Hardly.

Y passengers reduce the cost per seat mile. Imagine trying to negotiate terminal charges or catering or ground services for 250 passengers per day vs. 1000 passengers per day on a given route.

However losing money on these high volumes is disastrous as profits made in J get reduced. So there is a need for reasonably loyal Y passengers. the alternative is to rely on bargain hunting holiday travellers, which is a race to the bottom.