Another data point about Golds.

172 Golds on Guangzhou - Dubai last week. Absolute chaos at check-in and in the lounge. The SFS said that this was the second highest number of Golds he had seen on a flight - he once did a Lagos with over 200 Golds.

In contrast, Dubai - Beijing the previous week had only 5 Golds.

6'5'', short blond clipped hair, shirt and pants mostly. The occasional combat boot and Arabic language skills makes them think military contractor, I guess.

I had great success last year receiving upgrades from Y to J: once DXB-SYD, and then DXB-YYZ. I had just achieved silver at the time, and was doing a massive itinerary. I decided to thank Emirates by buying J this time, so here's hoping an upgrade J to F is coming my way between YYZ-DXB.

got up from ZRH TO DXB.
 

on EK 86 GOT OP-UP from zrh to dxb.... got upgrade after a long time but i suppose now the vacation season started in asia but it was worth the money.. love EK buznes..:D

Another data point from this week.

137 Golds in Y on DXB-ACC-ABJ (out of 213 pax).

People will now claim it is an exception, I do not:

This is the best example why EK needs a fourth tier. How would you differentiate your high value customers (no, not the IOs) in this environment?

And don't tell me that even then the flight will see at least a quarter with Platinums (or whatsoever it will be called), I am sure the threshold will be set wisely.

They can keep a track of how much money has been spent by a person to determine if they want to keep that person sweet. It does not need a new shiny card for the airline to do that.

If believing some of the claims on another thread, there will be less golds due to the alleged increase in saver fares and the lower earnings that savers deliver.

But Dave, doing it in the way you suggest might be suitable for a program like IO where you can pamper on individual basis but this is certainly not scalable for at least thousands of a potential new tier member. I don't care about the card but about the differentiated and systematically given customer experience.

How would you be able to do this on a very large scale by tracking "by a person"?

+1

Actually, it's not that hard. EK own an IT business called Mercator. While I don't know the total capabilities of the business or IT solutions on offer, a component of their platform is a CRM and loyalty management product.
http://www.mercator.com/solutions/CRM/CRM.aspx

To achieve "scale" all the business needs to do is to create another set of "rules" or parameters which its current system follows. For example, people who achieve 100,000 tier miles within 12-months, people who fly 4+ F sectors in a month, they can identify top 20 customers by route, by country, by spend etc etc.

The challenge is getting the human component right - ie delivering on the benefits. Or having the resources to deliver these benefits.

EK already have a Top 50 customer list by country/airport - which every EK station has access to.

Whatever we may think of UA, I can assure you they have this side of the business sorted out. Program has 3 standard tiers (Premier, Premier Exec and 1K), Invitation Only equivalent (Global Services), plus incentives and recognition for 1MM, 2MM and 3MM. They track spend on a membership base which is 5 times the size of EK's.

EK could easily do this - if they put their minds to it and had the right people (in terms of resource not just competence).

They can do it already. I have been evaluating the Mercator CRM and CASA product for my employer over the last few months and am very impressed by the functionality it can provide (if deployed properly). Tracking by revenue spend on base fares (but not ancillary spending) is already available as a function.

Don't ever purchase off Mercator. Their service following a sale can only be described as awful. This is from experience...

We decided on another vendor's system instead, partly due to similar feedback from other Mercator customers. We are still looking at Mercator for bureau outsourcing solutions though.

Of course it is the exception. EK operates around 2,500 flights per week and Accra is one of the few that these stats come up from on a regular basis.

Agreed.

I also flew IST-DXB last week and I was the ONLY Gold in Y class out of 158 passengers on a 2-class 772.