If there are changes, which are unethical?
 

In the quest to increase revenues, there have been a lot of changes, too many to list. Some of them strikes me as unfair or unethical and a few seem tolerable. Which ones?

In general, I think that devaluation of miles already earned is a low blow. While I wouldn't like it if future miles are discounted, such as discounted seats earning 75% of miles, these changes are not retrospective.

Therefore, making 25,000 mi. domestic awards impossible to get so you need to spend double, raising awards, and charging new fees for awards is shifty behavior.

Charging for food (or even everything including water on Easyjet) and charging for baggage seems less objectionable.

Charging for standby is stupid as standby is purely goodwill when seats are empty.

Does anyone else remember, in the late 1980's, when airline passengers were outraged that that collecting frequent flyer awards was virtually impossible, due to the restrictions? It even made the front page of the New York Times! Back then, the airlines resolved this dilemma by loudly announcing that they were (a) cutting back on the mileage required for a restricted award, from 25,000 down to 20,000 miles, and (b) creating a new unrestricted award for 2X the restricted miles.

Well, here we are in the 21st century, and the 20,000 mile awards have virtually disappeared, and the restrictions are tighter than ever. So essentially, the airlines (slowly and imperceptively) resolved this dilemma by doubling the price for award travel.

Unethical? Maybe, maybe not. Callous disregard for loyal customers? Definitely.

SleazyJet charging for water is just plane sleazy.

Charging for standby is horrible. It is space available, and of no harm to the airline.

Airlines (other than my beloved WN) do not have the term “ethical” in their books.


[This message has been edited by FlyingTexan (edited 03-09-2003).]

WN charges for standby, but the fares are low enough that it doesn't hurt TOO much. Although I don't like this policy, WN's other policies are so generous (e.g. full re-use of unused non-refundable funds) that otherwise one could game the system and never pay full fare.

That is right, nsx. WN charges residual amount if pax standby.

Anytime I'm standby on WN, it is because of DBC from an earlier flight and they could not confirm a seat until that last flight.

OH come on people - are you really arguing that changes to a set of program that have become a fiasco are unethical. Please don't loose focus of the reality the airlines exist for one and one reason alone - TO MAKE A PROFIT - if you really thin that is unethical, you can always take a MX Star ticket to Cuba with your miles.

Changes that are not done with ample notice of term changes that affect your prior transactions with the service provider are the "unethical" ones.

For example, having X miles in the "bank" and finding out that effective immediately, they are worth 50% of what they were yesterday. The argument that the program terms can be changed at will on their end doesn't cut it because they "sell" us through promotional materials award charts, earning opportunities, and so on. Announcing after the end of the earning period that the current period will have "reduced benefits" for your status - BAD - ie, the UA SWU situation.

Announcing changes that you don't need to participate in, such as from today forward, we charge for food, toilet paper, you will earn less for discounted fares, and so on, as you don't need to patronize that company anymore. I do restrict this comment to tickets you haven't yet purchased.

Every company has the right and necessity to increase prices, etc. from time to time. That said, a loyalty program based more on 'revenue' has a poorer argument in raising redemption values.

AA charges expedite fees for awards within 21 days. These are not justifiable, since it's all electronic, but IMO not unethical per se, since they are clearly disclosed.

However...

Recently AA eliminated paper certs. Folks used to keep extras around for last minute award travel, to avoid the fees. This is no longer feasible. This is especially problematic with upgrades: if your upgrade clears within 21 days of your flight, you are charged the fee even if you requested the upgrade prior to the 21 day deadline.

Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that AA is purposely not releasing seats into the upgrade inventory until the 21 day cutoff is passed, in order to collect the extra fees. And they may well be right.

If so, I'd put that into the unethical category.

FF programs do not exist to reward us for past business. They exist to motivate us to give an airline our future business. If an airline learns that its program has been more generous than it has to be for this purpose, it will cut the benefits. If it cuts them too far, it will learn that it has harmed its future business and will hopefully restore some. This is all Business 101.

Expecting airlines to maintain current award levels for current miles is like expecting a store to maintain its current prices if you use a gift certificate you already had when the price went up. Neither makes sense. If you buy a $40 gift certificate to get a coffee maker and its price goes to $45 before you get it, do you get upset? Of course not. It's the same with airline miles. (The fact that a few airlines maintained old benefits for existing miles when they made major program changes was an act of business goodwill designed to increase loyalty, not a promise that they will in the future or a reason to do so on the future.)

An award schedule is simply a statement that "right now, you can get this award for this many miles." That's all. Airlines give us 6-12 months notice of most changes, during which time we can get certificates good for another 12 months into the future. That's a darn sight more than any other kind of business you can name, with the possible exception of prepaid funeral arrangements.

While I'm all for not losing the value of my benefits (I have 1.1M AA miles and 400K DL miles in the bank right now), we have to be reasonable about what we ask for in terms of the airlines' business proposition. Just shouting "I want, I want, I want" won't convince Mommy to buy us that candy bar.

In most cases, I don't think FF changes are unethical. Sometimes I question whether they make good business sense, but that's a different story. I tend to agree with Efrem's gift-certificate analogy, even though I don't like it as much as I like to think of miles as cash.

I don't think that the airlines are unethical: I just think they are poorly managed and tend to do stupid things without thinking about how they will affect the customer.

Efrem,

They did not keep the old levels out of "goodwill". One of them got into legal trouble and made that "change" and they all followed.

I hate to disagree with a fellow Texan, but I'd gladly pay for water on easyJet when I get a one way airfare of 5 (!) pounds exclusive of taxes between London and Paris as I did last fall. Pay the inflated price on British Airways or Air France to get a "free" beverage if you wish, but easyJet's business model is far from sleazy if you ask me.

Fair Enough. Have never flown easyJet, but have heard extremely good things about them. I'd willingly pay for a bottle of H2O over a BA or AF fare any day.

I just got carried away playing with words.

While I agree with MOST of your statement, I think this is a bad analogy. It is "reasonably" safe to expect that the cost of the coffee maker will be influenced by the general market value of coffee makers in the market. In the case of FF miles, there is no necessary correlation between the "price" of a reward in FF miles and the general market price of the same trip/upgrade in real dollars. So the airline is not constrained by the price they are offering to the general market and are free to inflate the cost in reward points while remaining competative (or even slashing the price) in dollar terms.

I think part of the problem is that the airlines keep trying to lower expectations and "test" arrangements that frankly ought to be sacred.

They got in trouble in the late 90s, for example, for training their people NOT to give the lowest fare over the phone. And thrombosis lawsuit threats might be the best hope for getting them not to try to shave another two inches off seat pitch and one or two inches off the width in coach. How low will they go?!

Standbys are another area where customers (justifiably, I think) don't see a cost basis or justification to charge in most cases. There are quite a few others that are occasionally "tested."

Customers would empathize with airlines' plights a lot more if the airlines didn't seem so greedy and bent on taking every possible advantage. Some of the new invented fees and the "nothing sacred" unwise cost-cutting, as well as the normal insane fare structure where you can get charged pretty exorbitantly, all hurt them from a PR perspective. WN, for one, gets more goodwill because it avoids many of the worst excesses.