Great experience. They have just kicked me off a the second leg of a return flight that I booked and had the miles deducted in February. Clearly cash sales beat redemptions. What a fabulous way to launch this nonsense.

Move Beyond was done by Publicis.

To Australia, I assume?

Now the email is saying program integration...What the hell?

Received this email today, seems CX will be bringing Marco Polo Club and Asia Miles together.

Dear Mr XXX,Today marks an important milestone in our story – it's the day we launch a new era of Cathay Pacific, the brand under which we bring together our airline as well as travel and lifestyle-related offerings in markets beyond Hong Kong.
We do this with two goals in mind:
The first is to make ourselves easier to understand and use. By bringing together Marco Polo Club and Asia Miles under Cathay Pacific, we are simplifying the way you interact with us, including how you earn status and use your miles.

The second is to make our proposition more appealing. By integrating our offerings and building better partnerships, we aim to bring you a much wider range of products and services that elevate and complement your travel lifestyle.

Over the coming months, we will be rolling out a range of new offers – and these will culminate in a refreshed programme in the first half of 2022.

The new Cathay Pacific will be a celebration of all the things we love (and have missed) about travel – and a brand that is unapologetic in its love of everything travel related.

If there is one thing this pandemic has reminded us, it's that travel really does elevate our lives.

Looks like it’s a new umbrella brand covering non-flying / lifestyle businesses which CX is trying to launch - to reduce its reliance on flying. “Cathay Pacific” will still be kept as the name of the airline and the brand of the airline, but “Cathay” looks like an umbrella brand covering all businesses - current and yet to be created new businesses, and only be used in markets with lifestyle businesses rolled out. So in short, Cathay Pacific will be one of the brands under Cathay in the Cathay ecosystem.

—
From Marketing Interactive:

/// Earlier this month, Cathay Pacific announced its new business model. Under the new plan, Cathay Pacific will become just one of the brands within the Cathay ecosystem.

It's reported that the senior management of the company has likened the plan to that of AirAsia, which offers a wide variety of businesses including food delivery, online groceries as well as health and insurance segments. Previously, the company rolled out an ad that shows multiple lifestyle items via email to its customers. In that email, the company said that it is "always searching for new ways to help you move forward in style – to connect you with people, places and experiences that matter." ///

If they can't explain the umbrella branding clearly and simply to customers with tangible benefits, they have little to no hope of executing it successfully.

The more "worrisome" aspect of this is the signalling of changes to the Marco Polo Club:

Get ready for "enhancements".

Another wow-this-is-so-meaningful-email received today.... can't they just write succinctly what has happened?

----------------------------

5 July 2021
Membership No.: XXX XXXX XXX

Dear Mr XXXX,


Today marks an important milestone in our story – it's the day we launch Cathay, our new premium travel lifestyle brand for Hong Kong.

Whilst our airline will continue as Cathay Pacific, "Cathay" will be the brand under which we bring together all our travel and lifestyle-related offerings.

We do this with two goals in mind:

The first is to make ourselves easier to understand and use. By bringing together Cathay Pacific, Marco Polo Club, and Asia Miles under Cathay, we are simplifying the way you interact with us, including how you earn status and use your miles.

The second is to make our proposition more appealing. By integrating our offerings and building better partnerships, we aim to bring you a much wider range of products and services that elevate and complement your travel lifestyle.

Over the coming months, we will be rolling out a range of new offers in spending, dining, shopping, hotels, and wellness – and these will culminate in a refreshed programme in the first half of 2022.

Cathay will be a celebration of all the things we love (and have missed) about travel – and a brand that is unapologetic in its love of everything travel related.

If there is one thing this pandemic has reminded us, it's that travel really does elevate our lives.

<Learn More> (link to another website)

We can't wait to share more details with you.

Yours sincerely,
Marco Polo Club

Honestly Lipstick On A Pig comes to mind.

Well, I gotta admit, I like the copy. It's vague, ambiguous, and leaves me perplexed about what the hell they are doing, but I like the copy. The voice is uplifting and inspirational. The tone is optimistic. There are no grammatical mistakes, and even the use of "whilst" harkens back to the days of British rule. Lol. I guess.

Snap back to reality, I don't know the hell this is going to work out well. Why are they trying to hard to copy AirAsia? To me, it seems like management should double-down on their core business to get that righted first rather than adding a portfolio of wide-reaching businesses in which they have absolutely no experience. A new credit card? Yeah, cool, great. That's fine. I'll sign up when I can. But shopping, dining, hotels, and wellness? Come on.

Yeah, I'm pretty pessimistic about this, something of which we still know very little about. It just seems like writing on the wall to me though, at least for these new businesses.

-Chris

It's actually nothing different to what they are currently doing:

Shopping: Refers to Asia Miles redemptions
Dining: Asia Miles earning in restaurants
Hotels: They already act as a travel agent for hotels
Wellness:......who knows.

So as percysmith suggested....lots of lipstick.

Looks to me like they're trying to widen AsiaMiles into an online shopping site, looking to raise cash for what we used to spend miles on when we couldn't get/ didn't want flight redemptions. And if it is a case of earning miles from spending, then based on the blurb (and link in the message), it doesn't really look like you'll get miles from everyday spending to the extent that is (or was?) possible with BA / Avios

I sincerely hope they won’t link the card’s tier to your account’s tier.
I mean do they expect people randomly dropping 8M HKD opening new private client level accounts just for the damn card?

Broadly, Standard Chartered's Priority Private is equivalent to HSBC Jade. Both a half-way house between purist private banking and Premier/Priority, and both need USD 1m ish in total relationship balance.