ozstamps

One of that gaggle mapped out the very major changes to the QF scheme about 2 years back IIRC.

I had dinner with him here as he was flying back. His name was Randy Petersen.

mikalee

Out of the office for a couple of days and look at what you miss... not often a topic has so many posts and no mention of HPs in the QP!

Aside from the changes, which affect us all differently my biggest annoyance is with this paragraph from the "Changes to Upgrades" page;

In this excuse making day and age, QF seem to be implying that they have made a seriously bad business decision in reducing the number of J seats available. If demand fo internation J was "anticipated [to be] higher" why did they reduce the number available?

Have they have made a serious cock up or are have they mistakenly tried to coin an excuse for changing the method to upgrade rather than just flatly saying "we are changing it to improve our yield and RPKs".

On the other features:

I like the idea of one-way levels being reinstated and family transfers. I dislike most other "enhancements".

Being a lowly PB the QP will keep me loyal to QF/BA/AA but where it is worth it JQ (on short hops) and AO now come into the decision as points have become less valuable.

mikalee

Looking at the 3 tables here

Have I got this right?

The table title Qantas Award table is to be used for awards using any or a mix of Qantas, Air North, Air Pacific, American Airlines®, Australian Airlines, Brindabella Airlines, British Airways^, Jetstar Airways, Macair, National Jet, Norfolk Jet Express, O'Connor, Polynesian Airlines, QantasLink and Sunshine Express.

The table titled Partner Award table is to be used for any award that uses those above and or one or more of Aer Lingus, Cathay Pacific Airways, Finnair, Iberia, LAN, Air Niugini, Alitalia, El Al, SAS, South African Airways, Swiss Air Lines and US Airways.

The final table, oneworld Award table is for OW awards as per section 13.5 of the T&Cs which is for "an Award Flight Itinerary that includes travel on at least two oneworld Alliance Airlines other than Qantas and does not include any travel on any airline that is not a oneworld Alliance Airline."

John Cogley

All decisions are made predicated on self interest but as a previous *A gold for years I came across earlier this year, now UA, SQ, and NZ meet all my requirements apart from domestic where Virgin AO and Jetstar will get my business based on price (points are worthless and status to expensive to earn anyway). My thirty year dislike of TAA/Qantas has proved soundly based (public founded organisations never change their culture). I refuse to be held captive by bureautic nobodies even if they are misquoted (Martin ?).

Globaliser

My guess would be that this would have been a primary driver. Otherwise SYD-BKK-LHR and SYD-HKG-LHR (5994 miles?) would both earn fewer SCs than SYD-SIN-LHR, which would be an anomaly that potentially distorted the management of what is supposed to be a coherent system.Even through the beery haze on the first night, I did notice that UGs on QF10/6 between LHR and SYD will total the same number of points as a single UG on QF2, instead of being significantly more now. So I don't think there is anything wrong with this.I didn't read it as an excuse, but rather as a pretty transparent statement of the obvious. It's not inconsistent with a desire to improve yield (but not RPKs, as they decrease as you take out Y seats and put in J seats).

If you were the airline, you had a limited amount of real estate to play with, and at this particular point in the cycle you saw healthy demand in the back and recovering demand in J which was dependent on you putting in Skybeds, what would you do? Put in more J seats to depress RPKs, and then give them away as rewards and depress yield that way?

It's clearly a decision which management thinks is overall in the best interests of the shareholders, to whom they owe their primary responsibility. It may be a bad decision for those of us who like upgrades without forking over cash for a J or F ticket, but it's not a bad business decision.

peasant

Economist had article 2-3 years ago pointing out that FF points were a rapidly increasing supply, with the "value" set by the issuer, and concluded that inflation/ devaluations would be the obvious result.

Guess we are now seeing that, with more and more airlines (AA recently) lowering the perceived value of a mile.

I'm sticking to Asiamiles, though I think the longhaul awards there will go up at some point (gut feel, the earn/burn ratio for short haul vs long haul is out of whack, and I am sure will be adjusted sometime...)

Reason is that I know Asiamiles is a captive, with actual cash transfers (i.e. CX actually pays CPLP money for miles, and then gets money back for redemptions) unlike most other programmes where there is no hard cash backing the miles...

I.e. asiamiles is on a "gold standard", whereas other programmes are fiat currency...

Globaliser

One of the articles already linked to says that QF was under pressure from the ACCC to make it better for the low earning family account types. That would appear to be consistent with what they've done.

mikalee

Globaliser it seems to me that the reduction in J capacity was ill-thought if QF are happy to say "coupled with anticipated higher demand for international Business" as the reason people never/won't get upgrades.

If you have anticipated higher demand for a (profitable) product, you certainly don't reduce its supply if there are other options available.

My point is that by using the reduction in supply, their decision, as an excuse/reason for the suspension of the current upgrade system they are implying that the reduction decision was ill-thought.

Really if QF new that J demand would increase then why did they reduce the supply of J.

The suspension of the current upgrade system is a seperate (and correct decision from QFs POV) decision to enable them to better manage paid inventory. But by saying that they had to change it due to the lack of supply indicates that the decision to reduce supply in the first place was flawed.

GBA1975

Hmmm, anyone willing to place bets the next change to the QF FF points will be no points for discounted Why travel
The AA FF is looking more and more tempting

nonce

I personally think DJ could offer a loyality program that need not involve points or free flights. For the frequent flyer that does international flights, they would move to NZ, UA, SQ, AA, etc but if DJ wanted to capitalise on the domestic FF they could just offer things like:

1. Free lounge access with ability to bring in a guest
2. Additional carry on (extra piece)
3. Seating preference
4. Priority boarding

Some nice to haves
5. Free news papers on morning flights
6. Discounted food and drink onboard and in lounge
7. Cheap Companion Fares for up to 4 family members on same flight
8. Free upgrades to blue zone seats
9. Free/ cheaper inflight Foxtel

This would see me move to DJ for domestic and someone else for international.

DJ could have a single level of status based on revenue over the previous 12 mths or you could purchase the status along with your annual blue room membership but not get points 5-9.

wandering_fred

There is seemingly general agreement amongst flyers with reasonable overseas itineraries that it is now useful to be a member of more than one Oneworld FF program. Anyone want to speculate on the thought that at some point AA will be coerced to follow BA and no longer permit / enroll FF members with Aus/NZ addresses?

Or do I have my facts wrong about the BAEC program?

Seems useful to have children living in the USA......

WF

OzFlyer

If I was DJ I would be jumping onto the FF program bandwagon, but doing it as follows:

Join *A
Install a * Gold checkin counter
Offer free blue room access to * Gold
Offer upgrades to the Blue Zone for * Gold (for x points)
Let *A Gold continue to pay for food etc

The above would cost them nothing (or very little) as:

1) they need to chekin * Gold pax anyway - who cares what order they do it in
2) They offer the blue room for $5 so it is not like this is a kings ransom
3) They only have limited Blue Zone seats that they dont seem to sell to many of and the upgrades could only happen if they were not pre-sold

Now in order not to have the costs of a FF system in place, simply dont run the program. Allow members to join any *A carrier but do not offer your own program. The points you issue per flight would easily be covered by say the 5-6 redemption seats you make avaliable per flight and I can assure you that DJ's loads will increase by more than the number of redemption seats they needed offered per flight (which would have been empty seats anyway if they only offered them on low yield flights).

You would therefore have a FF program with no admin costs as other airlines would be running it for you - I am sure that *A would jump at something like this to get some coverage in Oz.

serfty

HeyAussie, You are right; that's impossible . I blame it on the source...please PM me yr email if you would like a copy of the OZ'centric XL spreadsheet I used (with at least one error)

MrsDrD

You just knew "enhancements" had to be bad news, didn't you?

And what do we think?

Oh, great idea, increase status credit earning to make elite tiers even easier to reach and maintain! And take away upgrade credits which were the only thing making SCs worthwhile anymore. Excellent idea. Not a glimpse of lifetime WP in sight, of course, but no worries, we'll just keep accumulating useless bl**%y SCs. And as the final touch, add in a patronisingly small loyalty point bonus. Mm, well done.

(And by the way, Qantas, I'm so sorry you were confused by your UC system. It was just so badly managed, 'tis all. We the program members weren't confused, just p*&%ed off that we could rarely use them before they expired.)

As if that wasn't enough, get rid of the ability to secure advance upgrades on international flights. Sheer brilliance. Can't imagine why they didn't think of it sooner.

(And as an aside, don't you love it when they retract earlier enhancements, though? One way awards at least are back, what did that take them, 2 years to backflip??)

Drawn to the inescapable conclusion (as several others here have noted) that QF doesn't really want really frequent high-revenue fliers to be banking miles to their program. Bit of a liability and all that. And hey, the easy way out is to p*$$ them off so much they go bank their miles with CX, BA or AA. They figure we'll still fly QF?

Wrong, dead wrong. While we were still viewing their program as our core FF loyalty, we chose to fly them wherever we could, we flew the flag etc. etc. even in the face of superior competing product. But if these changes force us over to CX program once we've calmed down and finished our sums, I'm damned if I'll set foot on a QF INT flight wherever I can possibly avoid it.

Roll on increased competition from quality players across the Pacific. That should sort out the men from the boys. And y'know what QF? You won't win that one. Going to enjoy listening to them moan over that.

Guy Betsy

Somehow it had to happen. BAEC members got their shock treatment last year and with the close working relationship between BA and QF, it was just a matter of time QF was going to follow suit.

It did.