Have FF Programs Jumped the Shark?
 

I reckon this is the most suitable place for this question.

Flying used to be fun. You could show up 10 minutes before a flight - smoke a cigarette during the flight - keep your shoes on when you went through security.

I find flying pretty dismal these days - but airline companies are still trying to figure out how to rise from being perhaps the least profitable industry in the world over many decades to second or third from last place.

And I think they're starting to get some traction.

One of the things that has to be curtailed is overly generous FF programs except for the absolute best passengers (you million mile or 50+ flights a year people - you know who you are).

I've been doing FF stuff for maybe 20 years now - and it has gotten harder and harder in recent years IMO for normal people like me. Who have branded credit cards and perhaps fly max 25K miles a year (usually a lot less). And whatever rules exist today - I don't think I can count on them to be in effect 2 years from now.

Anyway - I used to be able to count on getting good rewards tickets. Those days are gone IMO for average travelers - even those who spend a lot of branded credit cards.. What do you think? Robyn

Are frequent-flier programs losing their luster?

Just quietly... since you mentioned it... IMO the ban on smoking is the biggest improvement since the jet engine....;)

Let's see what we have here:
- You say that overly generous FF programs should be curtailed except for the very best pax.
- At 25K miles, you are at best a modest traveller. Certainly not one of the "very best" (by your definition).
- You complain about not being able to count on getting good reward tickets.

What do I think?
- By your criteria, you don't deserve ready access to award tickets.
- Flying is infinitely more pleasureable now that smoking has been banned in airplanes and most terminal areas.
- I'm just glad that Richard Reed tried to hide explosives in his shoes and not in a suppository.

Yeah, flying was a whole lot better when you could smoke your cigarette, walk out onto a tarmac, and board a prop plane that had a better than negligible chance of crashing.

Oh yeah, FF programs have jumped the shark (hey, thanks for the retro use of a term nobody's used since 2000). Because nobody gets to fly anywhere, anymore on any FF program. I mean nobody's interested in FF programs at all.

Oh, wait, there's at least one internet forum that appears to be devoted to discussing in minute detail how to get FF miles? And a ton of blogs? And every time a credit card company puts out an offer more people jump on it?

As the eminent hipster Emily Litella used to say, "Never mind. . ."

I had to look up what jumping the shark meant :D

Maybe Henry Winkler should re-jump it for all the kiddies.

Are you claiming that the phrase "jumping the shark" has jumped the shark? :)

Already discussed here. :)

In regard to the OP, yes, FF programs have jumped the shark. You should tell everyone you know that they have jumped the shark and aren't any good anymore. Seriously. I would appreciate it if you concentrated on how much AA miles and SPG points are worthless. ;)

Mike

I don't know if they've jumped the shark. The redemption issues started with the consolidation of airlines made worse by the current economy and cutting back of flights.

While never easy, I used to have a much easier time using my miles and now I'm finding I'm paying more and more with upgrades becoming increasingly scarce.

In the past, I would mostly pay for hotels and use carefully collected and hoarded miles for the air. I've begun to think about doing it the other way around, at least until availablity gets better.

I don't think showing up 10 minutes before the flight, smoking, keeping shoes on, etc., really has anything to do with FF programs, so take those off the table. The decline in the flying experience is a topic on it's own.

In terms of FF programs, I will say that I earned 700,000 points in 2002 by simply signing up for promotions targeting frequent fliers and taking about 90 flights. I was also tempted with status matches by other airlines. I used them to fly F and Y throughout the world with very little concern over availability.

I didn't have to sign up for credit cards, join a gym, buy coins, or go through S.P.A.M. machinations. I didn't need to pay to sign up for a "challenge" to get status. I didn't have to learn a foreign airline award tool to find awards, or deal with 20-30% award availability.

I've also been doing this for 20 years and agree with the viewpoint that FF programs have gone downhill *for frequent travelers*. Kettles certainly see the programs as better because they used to get nothing, now they get something.


side notes:
A forum to discuss in details the minutia of FF programs existed in the late 1990's. It was called Flyertalk.

Being told that FF programs haven't gone downhill over the last 10 years by members who joined FT 8-9 months ago kind of reminds me of my kids telling me how Justin Beiber has to be better than what I listened to, because Aretha, Stones, Zeppelin, etc., don't have 3D movies on DVD :p

Emily Litella is older than jumping the shark.

Like CPRich, I agree that FF programs have gone downhill for frequent fliers. We're at a point where taking a dozen paid flights earns less miles than sitting at your home computer for 10 minutes filling out a credit card application.

The Flyer Talk boards will really light up when inflation of miles shows up, as it inevitably will. Will award mileage increase? Will availability become tougher for those who don't have status? Will fees increase? I don't know but my guess is yes to all of the above.

I also agree with the comment about what FT used to be before it devolved into a twitter substitute: "Gee, I sent my app in 15 minutes ago. Do you think I should call to see what the hold-up is?".

I've only been playing this "game" for a year now and at times I've been happy to find some rewards (for example I'm flying to DC in late October from Omaha and got flights for the 8,750 mile promo from AA with TONS of availible times on that rate) but even almost a year out I can't get to Orlando without paying 25,000 miles each way.

I would think as more people signup for FF programs and all the information about them, redemption is going to be more difficult. Before all the information on the Internet and knowledge, I wonder what the numbers of people enrolled looks like compared to 10 years ago?

I have NEVER been able to redeem miles to MCO, and I go a few times a year.

It's a very popular route people are more than willing to pay for. If you can get the reward for 25k miles, then I would grab it.

Non-profit airlines?
 

I have probably missed when airlines turned into non-profits and started thinking about your pleasurable experience more than they think about returns to their shareholders.

Whether you like it or not, but airlines are out there on the market place to make money and maximizing the inflow of miles into their FF programs while minimizing opportunities to redeem them feels like hell to you but feels like heaven to airlines' shareholders

Jumped the shark?
 

Are you kidding, I've been at it ONE month and my family has accumulated OVER 700,000 miles!!! I'm loving this shark and may it continue to jump!

Yup - you got 7 new credit cards. Get back to me in 5-10 years - when you're no longer eligible for new card or other promotion deals. I've been traveling and using credit cards for 35+ years now - and don't qualify for most promotions. FWIW - when I looked into the recent AMEX/Delta transfer miles deal - they had a record of a point transfer I made almost a decade ago (and that transfer disqualified me in terms of the promo). Robyn

I'm all for companies making money. Although it has been an elusive goal for airlines:

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

— Warren Buffett, annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, February 2008.


OTOH - it would nice if flying were more enjoyable today. Note that my feelings about flying have nothing to do with FF programs - and sometimes don't even have to do with the airlines themselves - but with third parties - like the TSA. Robyn

It ain't what it used to be.

This 1k MM has seen a steady decline in the utility of both miles and status.

1k rooms, paper (and therefore unlimited) upgrades that cleared at time of booking, saver awards on all but a few flights. All gone the way of the dodo.

And now it appears that my airline's ff program is going lowest common denominator all the way around.

Having lots of miles and top status used to be something special. Now it's just something.

The airlines are likely making more money overall, but there is less and less loyalty engendered through their frequency programs.

So be it. I'll take the discounted business fares on whatever airline is cheapest and leave the status on the table.

Thanks for letting me know MCO is difficult to obtain.

I'm under the mindset that if I can't get $1.00 per mile I don't use miles. So for me to fly to Orlando and use 50,000 round trip that would mean I can't find flights for less than $500.00 which is never the case. Thus I would just pay for the flights instead and save the miles for another day.

If I had a million miles lying around or didn't travel often then it would be a different story.

since when does 25k miles a year mean someone is a "frequent" flier?

I guess I'm in the second camp of active FF program members - the frequent (and heavy) user of credit cards (don't the airlines make money by selling miles to credit card companies?). I think the highest charges we ever racked up were when my late FIL was in a nursing home - and we paid his nursing home bills through a credit card (nursing home for a year = about 3 trips around the world).

Perhaps the inflation in the miles required for award travel isn't being caused by people like me - or the real FFs - but by all the promos that are around these days - promos that don't reward loyalty to an airline - or a credit card company.

FWIW - it's a real bi*** for my husband and I to go through security - because he needs a big leg brace to walk. But I think we have the routine down pat now. Robyn

Since nearly all US-based airlines set 25,000 flown miles as the threshold for elite status.

That has been my experience as well. I think what bothers me more than anything else are things like CO not having any BF seats on its best routes to many international destinations at any price (at least that was my experience when I was looking over the winter planning travel for 2011). (I fly mostly CO and Delta because they have the most service out of my home airport).

Your idea about the airline/hotel switch in terms of using points/miles might make sense for some people on some trips. Robyn

That's the direction I'm taking.

Things have changed a lot since the mid-2000's (we were able to get CO/DL Saverpass BF rewards to Tokyo - Germany and France in 2006 - 2008 or so - and not in the middle of January either).

As for the poster who got 700k miles. No big deal these days. CO BF is 210k miles Saverpass to Europe - 500k for Easypass. Asia is 250k SP - 600k EP. And try finding any availability on a flight with a lie-flat seat. Robyn

+10

Being an old fart (at least in the eyes of some of you) - I am not entirely sure what you mean in terms of being a twitter substitute. Could you explain? I think perhaps some of these messages - like I'm in Chicago and my flight is now 2 hours late - I don't have a clue what's going on - does anyone know - might be useful. OTOH - you can usually get that info in a more primitive way (walking up to the agent at the gate and asking).

Note that I always travel with a notebook - have been doing that for 20+ years now - even when I had get on line using acoustic phone couplers. The problems I run into with wifi anything in most places is that the connections aren't secure. I will never log onto a non-secure connection - wifi or otherwise. I do that to protect the personal data on my computer. I suspect there are corporations that have the same security protocols (because I frequently pick up their secure password protected connections when I'm in a hotel room - or even here at home). FWIW - even though I am close to Medicare - if I had a device that I'd be willing to use to log onto a non-secure network - if you gave me about 30 minutes - I could probably hack your computer. A skilled teenager could probably do it in 5 minutes :D. Robyn

I have never had more success than in the last two years in avoiding payment for flights and instead flying nearly free for most of my flights.

That is the case with CO - where one year I got my husband CO silver elite status. And I now remember how I did it. We flew to Japan. Got one free BF ticket - one paid (only cost about $2.5k - a relative bargain IMO). With the mileage - and the mileage bonus for BF - we only needed a few more miles to get to that magic 25k. So I booked the cheapest east/west coast ticket possible at the time - which happened to be Jacksonville to San Jose California. The tickets were about $200 each. Extra bonus - relatively inexpensive Four Season in Palo Alto having a buy 2 nights - get 1 free offer. Extra extra bonus - it was a nice trip to a part of California we had never seen before.

Only problem is silver elite never did much for us. Got one upgrade on one segment of a domestic flight. And this was 5 years ago.

Today - an important perk - at least on a relatively inexpensive short haul flight - is not having to pay for checked baggage. Way I look at it - annual fee for most airline credit cards about equals the fees for 2 checked bags on 1 round trip for 2 people. Sound about right? Does lowest elite status get you free checked bags on most airlines? Robyn

Maybe FT could charge for each posting; that would cut down on the chaff! ;)

What airlines - what routes? In the front of the plane or the back?

My primary goal with FF miles is to get free international reward travel - business class (since the 2 airlines I use the most - CO and Delta - don't have 3 class planes for the most part - maybe not at all). Or perhaps first class transcontinental (like I'lm doing JAX/ATL/LAX this year on Delta - but I wouldn't pay up in terms of miles on CO - since half the trip - JAX/IAH - is on a 2/1 Embraer). Heck - I could get all the "free" flights I want from JAX to LGA or EWR - but why would I do that if I'm using my miles at < $1 per mile? Like slider34 - I insist on getting more than $1/mile - as much as possible more.

IMO - the international front of the plane trips are where it's at IMO in terms of maximizing use of miles. Robyn

I think you mean $0.01/mile. At $1/mile you wouldn't use miles for any 50k mile award that cost less than $50,000... lol

Personally I don't use miles unless I can get at least $0.02/mile.

I have flown a lot of those prop planes over the years. From Philadelphia to Ithaca NY. Miami to Tallahassee. Miami to Bimini (sea planes). Etc. I'm not sure what the crash/death stats were on those flights - but a lot were kind of scary because they were small planes that couldn't fly "over the weather" (whether the weather was snowstorms up north in the winter - or thunderstorms in the south in the summer). The one thing I can tell you for sure. The barf bag factor was really way up there :D. But I find myself on planes these days that still don't get "over the weather".

FWIW - the Holy Grail of many old time FF people like me is free front of the plane international travel. It's where you're getting at least $4-8 or sometimes more per mile. A lot of us old-timers got used to being able to get it. If we saved our miles - and were patient. And planned our trips carefully. Now - it's seems to be on its way to becoming an historical footnote. Robyn

Once again, I suggest you check your math. Either that or point me towards these $400,000 to $800,000 tickets to sit up front. lol

Of course you likely mean 1 cpm, but still...
it did make me think what a $1 per mile redemption would be... :D

The rules may change but it's still the same game. It has always been find the promo and milk it, whether it's the 2x deals last year, RDU/STL/BNA/PIT for AA, the current LAX-PVG deals on AA and UA/CO, 2x LAX/SFO-ORD/DFW etc, etc etc. Of course, it would be more appropriate to complain (the great American pastime,) about high airfares and hotel rates. I do miss the 3x promos and the low Asian and Euro fares, but nothing lasts forever.

As far as awards, I see some issues, but it is more a matter of lower capacity and more mileage balances generated with coins, credit cards etc, putting more miles into the system. That said, I still find award space that meets my needs, being flexible.

Yeah, don't know about that $4-8 figure. The all time best redemption I found was TW's 40k one free FC and one FC UPG on any fare US-Europe, generating about 12 to 20 cpm value. Now it's about 11 cpm for CX FC 135k AA US-Asia, so really not much difference.

By "twitter substitute", I was saying that a lot of the posts on FT say nothing, offer little or nothing and are meaningless almost on arrival. There's nothing wrong with Twitter, texting or other forms of communication-I use them too to find out information I need fast. But filling FT with meaningless posts about information useful only to the poster-like how many hard pulls you've had in the last month-has really changed FT and for many ruined it. To prove my point, just look at the number of FT posts by many of the most active participants-low totals, indicating recent arrival. Now high totals don't assure wisdom, but in my mind's eye, things have changed and not for the better.

As a smart person once said, on the Internet there is lots of information but not much knowledge.

Me too and these really are the salad days for FFers-cheap miles and good if not great availability to use them.

I wonder where things go in a year or two. Many people with fat FF accounts seeking to use them-I think of Mr. Pickles as the poster boy here, as I recall he claims to have 1.7 million AA miles and to have never set foot on an AA aircraft.

So do you think AA will just allow Mr. Pickles et al to take all of the available award flights? If so, how does AA use AAdvantage to get people to buy tickets and fly using them?

Good questions, with uncertain answers to come.

P.S. Lest anyone think I am being critical of Mr. Pickles, au contraire. I rarely laugh harder than when I'm reading one of his great schemes. He's one of the funniest people I media today to me-somewhere below Steven Colbert but certainly above Larry Kudlow and Kathy Lee.

Sorry for the misplaced decimal point - I did mean 1 cpm. Robyn