A feature in today’s Fairfax media, and the incandescent anger expressed in the comments, brings an issue Plane Talking has often raised to a flash point.
It accuses the airlines of dishonesty and deception in the levying of fuel surcharges and in their setting of what are laughably called ‘rewards’.
But the report by Clive Dorman stops where Plane Talking keeps going. After all, it takes willful, deliberate, carefully planned stupidity on the part of frequent flyers to keep chasing points.
The very definition of idiocy would be the ‘loyalty run’ where a customer deliberately spends hundreds if not thousands of dollars on a flight in order to retain the colour of a piece of plastic or qualify for the right to keep being robbed by ‘reward’ programs that are nothing more than data base ‘selling’ schemes.
Sure there are benefits in loyalty programs in terms of lounges. But is it commensurate with the cost, especially if there is no food and no seating left in the lounge, or you still can’t get a shower, or if the best thing to do at LAX for example is book a day room for a few hours, and not only get refreshed but enjoy truly fast free wi-fi and not have to keep an eagle eye on your luggage?
Here are a selection of ‘the penny drops’ comments from the Fairfax story.
PS The writer is in the Qantas, Emirates and Virgin Australia programs and dormant or lapsed in the Singapore Airlines program. All his points are given away or available to designated family members. None have ever been converted to a personal reward.
