Travellers don’t yet appear to understand that, when the liability keeps growing as new frequent flyers join the program and start flying, it is inevitable that frequent flyer benefits must periodically be reduced.
CHANGES to Australia’s biggest frequent flyer program were not only inevitable, but the professional points hunters saw it coming.
In fact, much of the criticism since Qantas announced the tightening of frequent flyer benefits in favour of customers spending the most money has come from those aggrieved about the winding back of benefits for those flying in the cheapest seats, indicating that the changes are spot on target.
And those who haven’t read the fine print need to get with the program: it isn’t fraudulent to offer benefits with a specific set of conditions if one of the conditions is that the conditions can be changed anytime the airline likes.
Airline accountants have become very skillful at juggling frequent flyer contingent liabilities.
But travellers don’t yet appear to understand that, when the liability keeps growing as new frequent flyers join the program and start flying, it is inevitable that frequent flyer benefits must periodically be reduced, either continuously in small increments, or with less frequent, larger jolts, like last week’s changes at QFF.
It is also inevitable that a number of Qantas frequent flyers will switch to the Virgin Velocity program, which is only nine years old and doesn’t have Qantas’s legacy issues. Anecdotally, Velocity members don’t face the same restrictions on travel dates and destinations as the Qantas program.
However, Velocity’s membership has roughly doubled since 2011 when Virgin got serious about the Australian business travel market and it, too, will eventually face the same liability issues.