If you want to take a serious whack to "unnecessary" flying, that's probably going to be what you're gonna get. Anything else is going to involve trying to knock a bump out of a rug.

Who decides what is unnecessary? For business travel, this could involve proprietary information. Do you want some politician to tell you how often kids should visit grandma or children of divorce should see the noncustodial parent, despite family court decisions and child custody arrangements? And is it really necessary for you to attend that friend's or relative's funeral? Wow!

Yes. And why are pressure groups such as this allowed to dictate to the rest of us?

If they are concerned about humanity�s effect on the environment, the best thing the ICCC could do would be to commit suicide en masse.

There is a lot of unnecessary flying, in fact, I participate in this practice as I�m sure most of us on FT do. When I pass through BKK, HKG or other big Asian airports and see the masses of tourists from China and India who look like it is their first trip abroad I do get concerned. There are billions more people looking to fly and travel than there were just ten years ago. They have just as much right to travel and fly as you or I do so I don�t know how to deal with this issue but I think it is going to be destabilizing for not just the environment but cities that rely on tourism in general. The sheer mass of people flying to and converging on a small tourist city has got to be harmful on many levels.

Basically I know there is a problem but I have no idea how it�s gonna be fixed. I do think FF programs encourage unneeded flying and I also think some form of taxation will probably be the route governments go to curb the excesses.

Most business travel is probably not necessary. Videoconferencing tech doesn't replicate the feeling of being in-person, but when counterbalanced with how environmentally unfriendly it is to meet in person, businesses might think twice about flying people out.

I think advocacy for videoconferencing would be much more effective than advocacy against frequent flyer programs.

But as we all know, many activists do not care about the underlying issue. They just want to stir drama, rile people up, and create a basis for condemning people's choices.

What nonsense.
I drive an Electric car, powered by solar panels. I've produced 24 MWh overall, 12 MWh this year. I don't (usually) fly just for points, I just make sure that the points for what flying I do count.
Sorry, but not sorry.

As a NRSA, I think I will do more flying now and take more connecting flights. Thank you extremist groups for letting me have more fun!

So, there are a couple of ways I can see implementation of these programs going:
(1) If UK-based programs are taxed/axed, I think there's a good chance you can just put a fork in BA 'cause they're done (since if non-UK programs can continue operating, there would immediately be a massive disadvantage to BA vs AA, for example). Of course, IAG being registered in Madrid would probably just result in them ducking out the back and saying "Whoops, this is an EU-based program, not a UK-based program, sod off", which would put them on better footing than VS.
(2) I can't really see the British government succeeding in banning FFP earnings on international flights to/from the UK on non-UK airlines, but I think there is a very strong case that if they tried that, the main effect would be to make the third Heathrow runway a pointless exercise (since however thin the earnings might be, you're effectively hiking the price of those tickets by 5-15% in most cases, something that would probably stack with UK APD in a very...unpleasant...way). I would expect to see a decent amount of traffic shift to Paris and Brussels (in particular), especially if you hit through-tickets as well. At least this wouldn't hose BA directly.

I do think that one thing would help both cut emissions and potentially help consumers would be to restrict up-charging direct flights vs out-of-the-way connections. On the one hand, if the stop is mostly "on the way" it isn't a big deal, but there's something silly about being routed 500 miles out of the way because, hey, hub-and-spoke!

Given that the whole Climate Alarm is little more than a scam, these people need to seriously get a life. A certain high profile individual in the USA recently debunked the alarm he and his fellow alarmist had been pushing when he bought a multimillion dollr energy hogging waterfront megamansion.

The question is - how much global air travel is from FF-related activity? Redeeming reward flights, mileage runs, etc. On any given flight, how many seats are filled by people doing those things? Is that data included in the report? I'd guess it's not much, but maybe I'm wrong. Like are we actually going for the biggest hitters in carbon emissions or is this all for show?

Air transport as a whole is only responsible for about 2% of CO2 emissions. This would only make the most marginal or marginal dents, while creating untold upheaval on the airline industry, which runs on tight margins at the best of times.

Again.. agencies/governments/Celebs/climate somethings etc
telling us to do what they themselves dont do...
This new electric car thing.. where do you think you get the electricity from to charge your car
Coal of course... and heck maybe some windmills.
I could go on.. but why.. those that agree will understand my point, and those that dont
that is fine. we are all entitled to our own opinion.
Leave my hard earn points and FF program alone

Is horse and carriage OK? (Should keep all the extinction rebellion people happy today for the state opening of parliament)

Is it unnecessary travel if I fly Asia-Europe long-haul four times a year specifically for the purpose of doing sports competitions which aren't available in Asia? If some country in Europe can give me a residential permit than these travel can be eliminated!

I think the question is a broader one of both induced travel (at the extreme is mileage runs, but low-fee award tickets are another item here) or incrementally induced travel (e.g. awkward routing chosen due to FFP benefits) as well as diverted travel (e.g. "Passenger would have taken the Eurostar instead of flying to Paris/Brussels").

One thing that strikes me about the plan that is half-cocked: I suspect that most of the higher-end travelers aren't "us", they're businessmen (and women) being sent around by work. If you throw an individual tax at them, there's a good case that you've picked the wrong target (and/or you're going to watch some stupid games of travel load being shuffled around more). At the highest level, the response will be "cash or card?" and it will simply be absorbed as part of the "cost of doing business" (albeit with some complications depending on how taxes interact) whereas at lower levels you're just going to be socking it to folks who don't necessarily have much choice in the matter. I can just imagine how frustrating it would be for someone who never buys their own tickets (100% business travel) to be hit with a tax bill at the end of the year and (presumably) not permitted to send it "up the chain".

In Europe, I think there's a plausible case for knocking out a large share of the shorter-haul flights. NB I'm not talking about cases like the Isle of Man, Jersey, or the Scottish islands (cases which I think deserve waivers, especially in cases where ferries run into significant issues). I am talking about some feeder routes where there's a decent rail connection (e.g. Lyon-Paris) and where a decent amount of the traffic is O/D on that pair (rather than feeding into longer-distance flights).

FWIW, any significant push on air travel is going to cause a certain amount of chaos in the field. I guess that's why I'm looking at this and just saying, in my mind, "phase in decent seat size minimums, restrict deep discounting, and let everything else sort itself out" and, if that doesn't cut it, perhaps chuck an additional tax on the airline side and let them figure out how to pass it through (with the requirement to do so as part of the base fare).

If the government wants to go down this road, one other thing that I think might be worth targeting would be adding pressure against airports having large amounts of (overpriced) retail (so they can't cross-subsidize operations with them).

Basically, take a machine gun to ancillary income on all fronts and I think there's a good chance you'd achieve a lot of the stated desired policy end-goals without nearly the mess that trying to administer a tax like this would impose [1].


[1] Because, as I noted elsewhere, there's every chance that you find plenty of compliance issues with taxing individual travel.