You almost never want to frustrate customers.

$4,000 on deeply discounted fares is still $4,000. If the airline didn't want to sell those fares at those prices, then it wouldn't price them that way - but the fact is, in order to pay to move the planes around, the airline needs nearly full planes. And a plane full of passengers on K fares is better than a plane with 4 people who paid $7k any day of the week.

See: Southwest. Low fares, but full planes.


If you can count on a passenger to regularly fill a seat on your plane at the prices you are charging, that's a good thing. Is it as good as a passenger who pays $7,000 for one seat? No, but you're not going to keep an airline afloat with those types of passengers alone.

Re: Upgrading on B fare to WBC with miles
 

In the past, I've wanted to purchase a B fare and upgrade with miles to WBC. The problem however, is that often the upgrade seat wasn't available when I had to make a decision on what fare class to buy. Do you buy the more expensive B fare class hoping that maybe the upgrade seat would open up later? Yes, I did that because at a minimum, I knew I would at least get 150% EQM's in case that upgrade seat never became available later.

Now with this change, my incentive to buy the B fare class is gone. Dumb move Delta! :td:

... Because another, smarter, airline IS going to give the bonus and snatch away that high rev passenger.

I think what a lot of people on both sides are missing is that there are a lot of pax who DO care about ff programs but are not that knowledgable on them. It sometimes takes a while for changes like DL is doing to sink in to them, but they will evenually. DL is setting up a slow motion train wreck. It's the Rob Borden fiasco all over again.

A good example is two colleagues from the organization I work for who were in my country the past few days. We went to dinner last night and the topic of travel back to a conference in the states we will all be attending soon came up. Both of them were NW elites, both silvers now although one had been a plat for several years while he held a position in which he flew about 200K miles a year. Neither reads FT, but both had decided when they heard about the DL merger that it would likely seriously screw up the NW program. One had a personal bad experience with SM in the past. They said that this time they were not even going to bother specifying NW as their choice of airline as they always had done in the past and assumed that our travel office would do its usual when no specific airline is requested and put them on UA. Neither was aware that they could comp status to another airline or at least do a challenge. They were just going to abandon NW and go with the flow of what our travel office prefers, which is UA. They did not know the details of how DL had screwed up the NW program, only that DL would certainly be in the process of doing that. One, fortunately, had started burning his miles when he heard that both airlines had agreed on the merger and was down to a number that no longer equalled a free ticket. The other had assumed he still had a while to do that and was not happy to learn that DL had already lowered the boom.

Since our organization is active in over 70 countries and has a lot of air travel, and we have a choice of airlines if we assert it to our travel office, I think it is time for me to put another post on our intranet to let other expats know the more recent details of DL's shananigans and also their options to bail out before they get any more travel booked.

IMHO there is a large group of flyers to whom these issues do matter but they do not have a means of keeping up with them. Getting the message out through efforts like www.saveskymiles.com or www.dlsucks.com can eventually derail DL management's train. The key is to reach those pax who do not read FT.

I hope we can help JeffBob go the way of Robby Boy!

For what it is worth, this was just confirmed over on the DL board.

Greetings:

All right then kids, we now have unanimity of result here I think. From high rev to low rev elite, DL/NW is looking to fire slash and burn elites. THEY ARE NO BETTER NOW THAN USELESS. GuWonder, not that anyone ever doubted it, but you are right, this fleecing at its finest. As one of the last of the apologists who tried to see the good side, I concede now as well. I am done.:td::td:

Safe Travels.

There have been some very interesting discussions taking place that there are in fact a number of specific circumstance when you actually DO want to frustrate customers. When you have a group of customers who are not making a profitable contribution or worse who are actually taking money from you. (See you WSJ article on Best Buy)
I agree with you -- you need all those different customer segments with customers paying the highest yield that you can extract from them while filling the plane as full as you can. However, that doesn't mean you need to incentivize everyone or base incentives on a simplistic measure such as miles. Instead airlines can differentiate incentives -- and increasingly are. Airlines who have been moving to 25% mileage earning as the standard on competitive economy tickets have been doing better in the market than those whose programs offer 100% mileage. DLNW not only see this, but are now part of the same virtual company that is moving in this direction. After all, when full fare economy is earning more mileage than discounted business class (125%), you know changes are on the way.

Oh... my... word...

Guess all we have to do now is wait for the '09 Plat packages, get the confirms on the web pages, then individually identify how we're going to utilize '09 benefits, and qualify for '10 benefits.

This really, really suprised me. I just never saw this one coming. I was guessing we'd see changes at the bottom-end of the fare bucket... yet just not the top-end.

That's very much in our thoughts. Delta tried that in 2001 but had to back off by 2004 after SaveSkyMiles had extracted sufficient penalty. A bit over a year ago JeffBob did indeed signal that reduced EQM's for discounted fares were again under consideration.

Are the people that own Saveskymiles still on Flyertalk? I think that domain is going to have to be dusted off again. Looks like DL is giving a go at what they failed to accomplish in 2001.

I am one of those customers who always bought B fares on TPAC trips. First of all the pricing difference was negligible, sometimes just a couple of hundred dollars ( or yen equivalent ), it afforded me a possible mileage upgrade, but in any case I collected 150% EQM. Since it seems that they are taking that away, it will be the final nail in the coffin for me. UA still offers the 150% as does CO, who will join *A. On CO though the PE mileage bonus will drop to 125% eff. Mar 1. That is the same as on SM and WP might follow quickly as well. The EQM is of much more value. I think.

The only thing I can think of is they will spin it off ASAP. If not the FF program will not be worth much.

RP owns SaveSkyMiles.com

And methinks it's time for a revival. As in right now.

I do (did) buy B long-haul flights sometimes . By running the eliteextraperks program last year NW encouraged me to buy pricier B fares.
zero incentive for me to do the same in the future though

Even if they reverse most of the changes, the element of trust will be gone for a very long time after this serious of homicidal bombings (ok, I'm a little extreme on the hyberbole, but darn it, I'm mad). ;) No one is going to assume they'll have significant value obtainable out of banked Skymiles in the future.

It is not the 25% miles that makes these airlines performance better in the market. It is, to the contrary, the fact that they were selling more tickets in euros and buying fuel in dollars when the dollar was in the tank. The US airlines at the time were predominantly in dollars on their sales. This is more a foreign exchange issue than an ff issue.

I haven't been to the Delta forum today but if what everyone here says is correct and the Y, B fare bonus of 150% eqm is gone so am I. CO here i come for a status match. Thankfully I haven't purchased and travel for 2009 yet. I only have burned all but 9k of NW miles.

Please reference:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/11139421-post168.html

Either this is a standard form letter ("to more closely align")...

Or this is confirmation that DL is going to 100% for YBM in '09, and with the alignment of WP to SM means that WP is going to 100% for YB in '09.

WP to decrease Y & B fare EQM from 150% to 100% on March 1
 

I called the NW PE line just now and asked the lovely agent about EQM earning on Y and B NW fares, after learning that DL is lowering MQM earning on Y, B, M fares to 100% from the current 150%.

She consulted her computer and told me that both Y and B NW fares will earn 150% EQM until March 1, 2009 when the earnings drop to 100%. She said these changes came down from DL and when I asked her if she asked her superviser or consulted her computer, it was from her computer. She apologized for the diminishing value of the WP program. She said she had a mechanism for reporting the customer's opinion about these changes and that she would report my :td: opinion of this new and "exciting" change to create the "best in class" FFP.

I thought others would like to know that NW has matched DLs decrease in EQM on full Y and B fares to 100% starting on March 1, 2009.

Onward to Continental for me.

Wow I am shocked.;) Didn't NW aquire DL? Wasn't NW supposed to dictate terms on this? Didn't Doug promise a brand new FFP first in its class? Oh wait .....

Safe Travels.

Nobody should be remotely surprised by this.

I am not surprised by it, and that was the reason I called up to ask the PE agents. I am only surprised it's not buried in some promotional email from NW, or communicated to us in any other stealth way.

Everytime one of these comes out I keep thinking "Well, that's that, what else is left to cut?!" Apparently quite a bit... :rolleyes:

Do you know if travel booked before March 1 but travelling after March 1 would still get the 150%?

This likely means that other fares are 50%
 

Just my guess given everything else they are doing.

I would look at what Flying Blue does. That seems to be the model they are going towards. We know about the EQM bonuses. I would not be surprised is LUT goes to 70%, 50% or less. We just don't know about it yet.

IMO this is still better than a no mileage accrual in other FF programs with discounted fares :)

I don't know. I only asked if EQM would still be 150% or decrease to 100% like on DL.

We never gave them a chance to bury it. We speculated that it was happening when some DL elites read the find print in their 2009 packages.

However, I take the confirmation as further evidence of the way in program mergers has been totally botched. That's no way to convey changes to your customers.

That is my biggest issue. I know nothing about this years program. Everything is a guess.

Funny since DL is used to handing out MQM's like candy...

Shhh, US still charges for water. DL will start doing that too, but only to elites.


I think this year's Elite package will be the most I've not looked forward to getting.

Ahh! But most of the candy MQM promos appear to be ones where the partner was paying for it. I'm willing to bet you'll still be able to make SM or GM by charging a crap load of money to the Amex and registering for a few choice lodging/car offers.

Great...let the fleecing continue

DL WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO COMMUNICATE THIS TO US?????
Come clean all at once. You are proving to be a very shady, shady airline.

I'm sick and tired of finding out about this stuff on speculative threads on this site bit by bit.

So great I can continue to by my $1200 B fare on the Saab to get a total of 1000 EQM for the r/t, when I would've gotten 1500 EQM in the past, meanwhile I can fly r/t to LAS on a $300 K fare and get ~3500 EQM.

Moderators, Please code this thread!
 

Since this has been confirmed, and the confirmation is being discussed here, would moderators please close this thread.

Merging would convolute the message/conversation in the new thread.

I was the OP in this thread.

Thanks!

But idea to bring this up, DTWflyer. They will make sure to correct this obvious deficiency by reducing the EQM earning ability of K fares to something like 25%. Then your LAS $300 fare will only get you 875 EQMs, which will be more equitable when compared to your Saab earnings. It is also in line with the best in class practices of other SkyTeam partners. :td::mad:

I am only surprised because this change would seem to harm DL/NW every bit as much as it harms us customers. Y and B fares are very lucrative for NW (as are their counterparts for DL) and it would seem that handing out an elite qualifying mileage bonus that costs the airline absolutely nothing (it doesn't serve as a multiplier on redeemable miles) as a potential incentive for customers to purchase more expensive fares is an absolute no-brainer.

To me, this change portends one very unfriendly forthcoming change: less expensive fare classes are headed for an elite qualifying mileage multiplier penalty. Get ready for 50% elite qualifying miles on the non-refundable, discounted, advance-purchase economy fares in the not too distant future. :td:

Precisely, in fact a couple of us were just discussing that possibly behind the scenes. 100% for YBM might still be a "premium" over lesser amounts for LUT & HQK. Think 50/75/100 or 25/50/100.

Problem is, they now have a large rebellion brewing on both sides of the aisle.

let's wait, maybe 25-50% EQM/RDM for discounted fares in the coming months :S