You may not subscribe to All About Airplane Wheels Magazine, but if you travel frequently and/or are a mileage addict, the Freddie Awards are for you. We like them because they are the brainchild of Randy Petersen, the king of frequent fliers. We once were in the same room at Randy at a party, and found that when we awoke the next day, the airline fairy had deposited a certificate for 5,000 Continental miles under our pillow. The man is pure magic.
Categories for the Freddies revolve around guest loyalty programs in the airline and hotel industries, including credit card tie-ins. The awards ceremony will be held in April at a Marriott in Arlington, VA, but we wish they could have held it at a straight-up airport hotel for the full effect.
Is it that time of year already? No, not holiday shopping and tree trimming time. It's time to book "mileage runs" to bump your frequent flier mileage up to where you'd like it to be. At least, that's what Joe Sharkey tells us in his latest On The Road column.
Here's the deal, says Joe. If you want to retain elite status--silver, gold, double-super platinum elite, whatever--you need to fly a set number of miles in a year. (Usually at least 25,000 for the lowest status, which can net you early boarding, free upgrades and smiles from gate agents.) Credit card purchases and the like that accrue miles normally don't count: You've actually got to put your butt in the seat. That means Joe and his buddies have been known to fly back and forth to Guam--twice--to boost their mileage. Our fave part of the article, though, comes when Joe chats with a shadowy figure in the frequent flier world known only as Viajero Joven:
"Some people want to do over 50,000 miles, which is not possible in a single trip because of the size of the planet," he said. "So they do multiple trips, consecutively."
The San Francisco Chron checked up on the various schemes to transfer frequent-flier miles to other people, and what it saw wasn't pretty. The money graf, though is about how pointless these programs are for most people:
Frequent-flier programs are, as you probably know, called "loyalty programs" inside the industry. But everything I hear about frequent-flier programs these days reinforces my view that the only loyalty the big airlines really want is the loyalty of travelers who fly a lot and buy expensive tickets. For the most part, that means frequent business travelers whose trips are paid for by their employers or clients. Airlines don't give a tinker's dam about loyalty of occasional leisure travelers -- or, for that matter, travelers from small businesses who buy cheap tickets whenever they can.
The International Herald Tribune's Roger Collis has a good time mulling over the chintzier by the minute world of frequent-flier miles. Seriously, when aren't dates blacked out?
The money quote is from the founder of EasyJet: "Low-cost airlines cannot afford to give FFPs [frequent-flier programs] - which is why we are low-cost. FFPs are bribery, and like any bribery system, they convince people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise have done. Air fares could be reduced by at least 10 percent if FFPs did not exist."
Bribes -- now there's a sexy marketing angle for the airlines to try. Too bad it didn't work for Hooters Air.
Yes we know JetBlue finally offers a frequent flier program, but late last year we were a little frustrated with the whole segment earning thing, so we called JetBlue for some clarification on the TrueBlue program.
"Yes it takes a little longer to earn a flight, but once you have a flight you can get on any flight JetBlue offers, we don't blackout passengers, which is great."
Wow we thought. We took this to mean any flight we saw online that had availability could be booked using your TrueBlue reward flight. Now that was a cool frequent flier feature. We were wrong.
Got some ancient frequent flier miles with US Airways? It's time to create some activity in your account, or risk losing them. On Feb. 15, the airline will erase the miles in accounts that haven't had anything done to them for three years. All isn't lost if you don't want to redeem them right now, though -- signing up for the Airways email newsletter, for instance, gets you 1000 more miles and also qualifies as account activity. You might also want to consider buying still more miles, or redeeming the miles you have in one of those magazine-subscription offers.
An airlines study put together by USA Today has found that the number of seats bought using frequent flier miles has decreased from 1 in 14 a couple years ago to 1 in 16 now. That's a decrease of 13%. Sure, one reason for the decrease is that people are finding it harder to redeem the precious miles for seats. Another reason, though, is that for domestic flights at least, the miles are worth less because of competition from the discount carriers.
Could it really be true that frequent flier programs are only 25 years old? For something that's so ingrained, that's not very long. Begun in 1981 by American, the initial program had just 283,000 people enrolled. Now there are literally trillions of miles out there stockpiled in various FF programs, with 75 million people enrolled throughout the world in at least one. As the Star-Telegram reports, the programs are facing more than a few growing pains. For one thing, the cheaper tickets of discount carriers like Southwest and JetBlue have effectively made the free-flight rewards worth less than then ever have been before -- about a penny a mile, down from two cents just a few years ago.
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by djk
The San Francisco Chron checked up on the various schemes to transfer frequent-flier miles to other people, and what it saw wasn't pretty. The money graf, though is about how pointless these programs are for most people:
The International Herald Tribune's Roger Collis has a good time mulling over the chintzier by the minute world of frequent-flier miles. Seriously, when aren't dates blacked out?
Got some ancient frequent flier miles with US Airways? It's time to create some activity in your account, or risk losing them. On Feb. 15, the airline will erase the miles in accounts that haven't had anything done to them for three years. All isn't lost if you don't want to redeem them right now, though -- signing up for the Airways email newsletter, for instance, gets you 1000 more miles and also qualifies as account activity. You might also want to consider buying still more miles, or redeeming the miles you have in one of those 
