ToddSpam

so i may be better off with the new system

i bought my tickets on march 12

flights are on ua and lh

roundtrip is about 8000 miles, so the old system would be 12000 award miles. my base fair was about $3000, so with 6x mulitpilyer i get around 18000 miles

could be very good!

andywaw

Fare will be recalculated from $ to € before multiplying

LukasNied

Can someone help validate my calculations. Example of JFK-ZRH-BCN return in First class with A fare code on JFK-ZRH and D code on ZRH-BCN flight
Based on the M&M calculator one gets 30,032 status miles (incl executive bonus). Assuming that my ticket costs $8,000, which is eur6,500 - at approx rate of 1.23, and I have Senator status, I get x6 award miles for 1 eur- which is 39,000 award miles. So that is actually more than status based miles based on fare code and distance table. What am I missing?

ToddSpam

well that sucks

dsched

Unfortunately I do not have SEN status so it's 4x fare which for A class tends to work out much lower than the current regime.

Dave_C

If you're travelling on the North Atlantic, I believe most fares can be issued on UA or AC ticket stock too? Surely it would be more advantageous to get it issued on 016 ticket stock, but still fly on LH metal? For routes elsewhere I'm not sure there's such an easy answer.

shorthauldad

What makes it unsustainable?

What would a sustainable level of earnings be on that particular fare?

Lewis42

andywaw

I don't know why people are so happy about the new system, perhaps only when they buy extravagantly priced fares like €6,500.
My First Class ticket WAW-FRA (LH, J) + FRA-SIN (LH, A) + SIN-ZRH (LX, A) + ZRH-WAW (LX, J) is going earn 46,571 award miles, incl. Executive Bonus.
Judging by what I paid, I estimate the revenue system might give me only 30,000 award miles give or take.
The difference is clear. That's how it's designed.

dsched

Exactly. I'm looking at my SIN flight in A and it's close to 50 per cent decrease.

Lack

I suppose there's plenty of people paying that for a one way J trip across the pond to keep the show going. They probably don't care that much about the miles anyway, but it's easier to sell it as an improvement for the cost cutting exercise then if there's at least one winner besides Lufty.

1flyer

Just because you're flying first doesn't mean you're one of their most valuable customers. There's a reason most airlines are cutting down their capacity in F.

Also, it's not entirely clear to me you're losing disproportionately as a buyer of F tickets.

I think M&M's aim here is to reduce overall mileage earnings. Of course, if an economy experiences inflation in most years, airlines are forced to increase either redemption rates or cut earnings rates now and again. (If they didn't, they'd have to give out more awards even if flight volume and ticket prices in real terms remained exactly equal.)

The rationale for reducing earnings is that you don't want to inconvenience customers by changing redemption or earnings tables too frequently. So they take this reform to a revenue-based system as an opportunity to devalue the program somewhat. They're killing two birds with one stone.

yurtripper

Where is the inflation you speak of? It's not that evident in Europe as a whole, or in fuel prices. Maybe you're referring to inflation in the M&M program itself in the Milton Friedman sense of inflation being a monetary phenomenon of too much supply (miles in this case). But M&M is just about the least inflationary program out there in this respect - hard expiry, low earnings (practically non-existent in cheaper cabins), v. high qualifying requirements, no easy way of gaming points via CC spend, few ways to earn or buy miles via other means. It's not like they're giving away miles like they're going out of fashion, is it?

M&M was already one of the meanest programs around, so the idea that they need to heavily cut back on points accrual to counter 'inflation' doesn't hold up for me.

This is something we can definitely agree on.

1flyer

Well, I realize headline inflation in the eurozone (as measured by the HICP) is merely 1.2 per cent right now. But obviously, I expect it to move closer to 2 per cent within the next year or two. At least the ECB is trying very hard to get there.

And with 2 per inflation p.a., airlines need to reduce the mileage value by roughly 10.5 per cent (due to compounding) every five years in order to keep the award program equally generous over time.

Apart from minor changes regarding select non-LH group partners, they haven't tweaked the redeemable-miles related rules for a LONG time. My take is they reduced average redeemable mileage earning a bit now because that's less disruptive than making another adjustment to the rules in the near future.

htb

I don't understand what you're talking about.

There's absolutely no inflation in mileage earnings when using the current system of distance-based earnings. In addition, the fuel surcharge has to be paid separately on M&M tickets anyway (with very few exceptions). Also, the paid tickets used for collecting miles increase in price as much as the award tickets used for redeeming flights.

It's only once you base earnings to fare paid that you have to take into consideration inflation. Expect a 20% increase in required miles every 5 years -- I don't believe for a second that LH would actually base the increase on real inflation data...

HTB.