2006 OnePass Program Changes
 

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Link: http://www.continental.com/onepass/n...B8C5144279BFFA

Good:
Effective February 1, 2006, you may redeem reward travel within the 48 contiguous U.S., Alaska and Canada on round-trip flights of 1,500 miles or less for only 20,000 miles.

Bad:
Effective April 1, 2006, some Easy Pass BusinessFirst reward mileage requirements will change:

Terms and Conditions:
BusinessFirst EasyPass reward increases are effective for new rewards ticketed on or after 4/1/06. BusinessFirst EasyPass reward tickets issued prior to 4/1/06, regardless of travel dates, will behonored at the lower amounts.

Personal Comments: Overall, I'd say the changes are ^
I mean, who really (unless desperate) would fork over miles for EasyPass anyway! Actually, I say this tongue in cheek because I know what usually happens...seems like StandardPass is never available in both directions and many suck up and pay EasyPass rates for one leg of a trip to get the flights they want :td:


Edited to add clarification and personal comments :)

another good thing that has been a rumor up until now, which surprisingly isnt on the page with the changes, but on the news & offers page:

2006 OnePass Program Changes
You can now receive your BusinessFirst upgrade rewards until 24 hours prior to your scheduled departure. Previously, 72 hours were required.

Its official and in writing on the CO site...elites rejoice! ^ ^

the changes in SleazyPass really sucks.
why not change STANDARD and make more available?

My only guess is that they want to make sure SleezyPass never, EVER gets used...which would seem to defeat the point of sucking away all those points. It might mean they're getting very good at making people so desperate for rewards that they're starting to use SleezyPass more, which means they can ask for more points in return. What a horrible idea.

I tend to think they're going to further (heh, don't know how much tighter they can get!) on the standard awards, forcing more people to sleazyPass, and hence the increase hits everyone more.

I suspect that with their tight controls on standard seats, they saw too many seats "given away" at sleazypass levels... Yeah, CIGAR, I wonder how many of that vast number of awards you cite were SLEAZYPASS, I bet its a lot higher than anyone else.

Yes, make more awards available, but don't give anyone any ideas about increasing the levels for standard!

I'd agree with this to an extent. I'd wager CO's rev. managment saw demand for EZPass was too high (as in they were 'selling' too many EZPass BF rewards) and subsequently changed the reward levels.

Also, did not DL change their SkyChoice rewards to Europe recently? Perhapes this will be the new SkyTeam norm now?

Hmmmmmm... one wonders if NW will follow suit when they announce the next batch of changes for WorldPerks. Who knows, maybe they wont need to now as they must be raking in the dough from selling isle seats for $5 and emergency exit rows for $25. Yes NWA, now you're thinking smart! Reaaaal smart. :rolleyes:

CO award availability, even for domestic coach travel, has been and continues to be abysmal so lowering the number of miles required really doesn't matter.

I suspect the changes are to reduce EasyPass redemption which is why Europe is getting a much bigger increase than Asia. That was NW's reason for the dramatic jumps they made last year.

Steve

Sounds about right.....don't provide any seats at Standard award levels so people will be forced to redeem more miles for SleazyPass awards. Now that people are redeeming at the SleazyPass level, it appears that too many seats are being given away (with the lack of capacity controls on the SleazyPass awards). Ergo, better significantly increase the number of miles needed for a SleazyPass award so people won't be able to redeem for those either. Gotta hand it to CO.....no other program comes anywhere close to them in making it difficult (if not impossible) to redeem awards.

How so? CO doesn't control its partners' inventory. Sure it might be tough to get a seat on CO, but who cares if someone else will get me there using miles?

Clearly people are using EasyPass rewards. I have a feeling it's a function of people not knowing how to check the partners (you have to call), and when you check them, you often have to propose partners and routings to the agents.

It's clear from this change that the EasyPass use has become problematic for CO. Now that fares and loads are increasing, the use of an EasyPass reward most definitely is a hit to CO's pocketbook. Unlike a Standard reward, where inventory is so controlled, they don't expect to fill that plane anyway, the cost for that seat is minimal.

Perhaps if CO stopped pushing EasyPass rewards and beefed up training on how to find standard partner awards, they wouldn't be selling so much EasyPass.

I guess the question is, which is better for CO -- to pay for a partner's standard seat, or to give you an EasyPass seat and lose the revenue associated with it. I have a feeling that paying the partner is not as much.

Sorta - I'd guess that more people are now competing for the same number of BF seats thanks to partners, promotions and what have you. I don't think that CO wants us not to be able to redeem rewards; it's just they can't give away the farm to make us happy.

Yet, when CO sells OP miles to partners (a la AMEX paying DL half-a-billion dollars) they should realize if they wish to uphold the "value" of their miles they need to make it possible for folks to redeem them. There could come a point when no one wants the miles as they feel there’re worthless due to lack of redemption opportunities. I hope it never comes to this, but if it does, it's a good example of marketing hyping up expiations through making grandiose promises but failing to deliver on them due to justifiable concerns from accounting.

Long story short: if CO is selling more mileage to partners for large $$$, perhaps they should use a portion of said funds to allocate more revenue seats into reward inventory to offset the increased demand for free travel. Failing to do so can result in a failure to meet customers expiations and devaluation of potential future partner mileage sales. (Don’t kill the goose laying the golden eggs!)

Last year Larry had a slide that showed demand for BF upgrades before and after the co-pay increased. Perhaps he will have a similar illustration regarding redemption of (or anticipated redemption) of the new EZPass BF rewards.

J. Edward, it has come to that in my case. I am the last-minute purchaser of numerous full-fare international coach tickets (due to many surprise customer opportunities). Since I fly only international, the fares are usually quite high. I would imagine that I am the type of customer CO would make the most profit on, after paid J of course. Because of the difficulty in using my miles on CO, I've begun flying partners and non-partners for all my travel. No revenue goes to CO at all, even though I am a plat. I will still book miles whenever possible from partner flights, but I won't go much out of my way anymore. It's just not worth it.
The only reason I still collect Onepass miles at all is to ensure I'll have enough to take the family somewhere in the S. Pacific in J for a nice vacation, thus using my bank in one glorious shot.

Continental is treading on ice here, as far as I am concerned.

they're reducing the value of miles even more by making BF rewards 25% more expensive. That's on top of the abysmal "standard" availability.

I can get pretty good availability in LH F to TLV through UA for 140k, why should I play games with CO?

I think all carriers have the same problem - that EasyPass (called Standard awards on United) awards are being redeemed at alarming amounts, especially for premium cabins, oftentimes reducing the number of seats to be sold at full fare.

It's quite amusing to see how EasyPass redemption amounts are only double or so that of standard awards - when full fare BE and coach fares are often several multiples of that of regular revenue-generating fares. If you look at it this way, even this latest round of increases for EasyPass business class awards still makes getting an EasyPass award a great deal.

What about the theory that CO sees the seats as worth the extra cost of the additional miles, and they know that there are a lot of unredeemed miles sitting in peoples' accounts, so this just helps them get the miles off the books more quickly? I don't know how CO accounts for the "cost" of the outstanding miles, but there has to be some calculation that says having people cash more of them in is better for CO.

Also, if you still subscribe to the $.01/point theory, "paying" $2500 for a J ticket to Europe with no restrictions isn't a bad deal at all. Sure, $2000 was better, and $1000 is the best. But the redemption levels aren't horrible values for the miles.

Finally, I have to be one of the naysayers on the zero award availability theory. I've just booked my RTW ticket using CO, and got flights where and when I wanted them. Some are on partners, but overall I got all but one of the CO flights I wanted. And the inventory comes out of the normal bucket, not the Platinum bucket for the RTW rewards. There were actually a few extra flights that had PLT availability but not standard so I have to fly AF instead of CO. I'm not saying that there is always availability exactly where and when you want to go every time, but I've never had trouble coming up with ways to redeem my miles.

S.

sure, $2500 for an unrestricted business class ticket is great.
I generally don't need "unrestricted", I just need to go AROUND a particular time, not a specific time.
$1400 for a restricted first class ticket with decent availability is far better, and since you can pretty much "buy" (via ameniti) miles for 1c a piece, that's how much it costs.

That's actually a pretty interesting point. I never thought of it that way.

If they set the Onepass international rewards at a ratio to actual cost vs domestic tickets the house of cards falls in.

Those of us who are willing to save miles over a year for a family vacation in first will not save for four years. I think that would cross the line and adversly affect the airlines. Airline miles turn into a joke with no reward.

At the point international standard rewards were 400,000 miles demand would fall off, and beyond loyalty inducement, airlines would not be as able to use miles as a customer service currency. :p (unless it just becomes inflationary.. IE three hour delay = 50000 miles)

Well, part of the problem is that earning miles generally gets easier with each passing year.

Good point - and airlines are more than willing to dish out more and more miles these days, from triple miles to double this and fly X times by August 31 and earn this and that... you get the picture.

At some point you have to accept the fact that as a whole, mileage balances have become inflated, but by far not equally across the customer spectrum. What you have indeed, is that those who fly the most, will earn more than their fair share of miles, and be the only ones who can afford the 500,000 mile award ticket. This pretty much accurately reflects society - the inequality of wealth in developed countries. I don't mean to inject a social injustice comment in here, but it sure looks similar. :)

has anyone else noticed how BF Sleezypass awards are tougher to find lately for popular int places for later this year (I was looking around thanksgiving--seemed to apply for other november dates too earlier in the month)....something tells me the sleezypass availability will dramatically increase after 4/1 :mad:

As there are no capacity controls on SleazyPass awards, and it is unlikely that flights are completely sold out in BF ten months from now, I think this is probably more a function of a bug on the CO.com website, I'm sure if you called the phone reservations line they'd be able to book you a Sleazypass award.

Yes. Go SkyTeam!

With thoughts like this we wonder why availability is down and redemption amounts are up. Now the public is making excuses for the airlines.

What do you mean by excuses?

The cold truth is that no airline worth flying will EVER allow its frequent-flyer program to displace significant numbers of revenue pax with pax traveling on FF tickets. The golden rule is to never allow someone to fly for free if s/he would have otherwise paid for the ticket.

CO's NonePass is a program I will still avoid. When an airline is bad even about award space for its own frequent flyer members even flying its own metal -- or especially for its own FFers -- I see no reason to change my avoidance of CO's FF program.

Plenty of other airlines actually give substantially more award space to their elite members on their own metal than CO.

Well, apparently DL "tested" it either once or twice. See a thread I started in the DL forum within the last 24 hours.

Here's the thread I was referring to, whereby DL "tested" the removal of capacity controls for its domestic awards and international biz awards on its own metal:

http://flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=515176

Frequent flyer programs are meant to engender loyalty by winning the airline a passenger's business. But defending airline's anti-customer policies and practices takes "loyalty" to a "loyalty program" to an extreme. I too am amused that elements of the public are making excuses for the airlines.

FF programs generate a lot of money for the airlines ... giving them cash now for services -- generally cheap service -- that will not be delivered until later, if ever. To further fleece customers with excessive capacity controls or ridiculously high levels for less restricted award travel is a wee bit bothersome and then some. Then again, frequent flyer miles are just another form of funny money currency, but fortunately that recognition can be deferred until right before -- or sadly after -- the liquidation of an airline.

I don't agree with this. I have tried unsuccessfully many times to upgrade a paid ticket, wound up using instead miles for a free B/F ticket when going trans alt or trans pac on vacations. So Co lost usually the cost of 2 tickets and upgrade fees and we flew B/F free.

Jerseygirl:
In the last week or so, CO released tons of R seats to Asia (HKG/PEK). Up until then there were Zero R seats after May 24. If you ever wanted to buy an H ticket and upgrade to PEK (~$1,500) or HKG (~$1,600) now is the time. Last I checked theay had released avaialbility thru September 30.

This has been a sore point with several of us who wanted to buy a ticket and upgrade rather than use miles, yet, while there were plenty of standard award BF seats available June thru Sept, one could not buy a seat and upgrade on the spot. Hoepfully, this has been fixed going forward and when BF award seats are released, R seats should be available at the same time.

If you have availability of the KVS tool, you can monitor R availability as it becomes available.

But they forgot to send over some R seats on 2/10 to HKG! :eek: :mad: :(

PS: KVS Tool = Cool
PPS: KVS Tool + Access to SHARES = VERY Cool!!

I also don't agree with this. "Never allow someone to fly for free?" A goal of FF redemptions might be avoiding the displacement of revenue seats, but this must be balanced with the goal of making the program marketable.

Airlines approach this concept in different ways. CO, DL and NW are notorious for keeping availability limited, usually until close to departure, while AA and UA are known for their generous redemption options.

How do we know who would have otherwise paid for their ticket vs. not going at all? The airlines certainly don't.

the 20k reward is definitely a positive.

It was not too long ago when all domestic CO awards were 20K. It was a big selling point of the program just 4 years ago or so.

Other airlines like UA and AC have a 15K reward for short haul flights.

the 15k rewards are for N/S distances of < 750 miles. These are good to 1,500.

Any info on if the 1500 apply to connections or only nonstops? Is it 1500 nonstop distance between A and B, or 1500 including the connecting point?

Now what would _really_ make me happy is if they somehow modify the rules to allow US--Mexico short haul awards. Nothing like blowing 35k on a 40 min. RJ. :rolleyes:

well, this opens up most of the continental USA to IAH flyers for only 20k, and includes YYZ.