While I still love my frequent flyer miles as much as the next person, I have not been diligent about monitoring them. My friend Nancy White has and what she has discovered is something that Northwest Airlines is apparently not sharing with their customers---in its world the distance between two location is a lot closer.
I was checking my frequent flyer miles on Northwest Airlines and thought, hm, the total qualifying miles seems low, considering I flew from Seattle to NY, to Austin back to Seattle. Only 3,346 miles. That didn't seem right. So I went to the Flying Distance Calculator. Hm, quite a discrepancy. Considering the lower nautical mile figures, NW is crediting me about
NW Says LGA to IAH - 709 miles
Flying Distance Calculator says - 1229
Sea to Newark NW says 1201
Calculator says 2080
Houston to Seattle NW says 937
Calculator says 1626Now if Northwest raises prices because fuel is going up, yet they are actually flying LESS miles due to some crazy math, something is wrong here. I'm losing 2088 miles (and, with my elite status, another 50% on top of that.)
This is the 25th anniversary of frequent flyer programs. There are some that say, there is now a chink in the chain of brand loyalty that frequent flyers have for their airlines. Prior to 1981 when people wanted to fly somewhere they would call a travel agent and say,
"I'd like to arrive in San Francisco around 4:00 p.m."
However, after airlines launched frequent flyers, consumers completely changed their behavior. Instead of selecting an airline that met their schedule, they would say (still to a travel agent).."how close to 4:00 can Northwest Airlines get me to San Francisco?"
What used to be a 25 minute window of tolerance now opened to up to over 3 hours.
Dan Reed, at USA TODAY recently wrote a comprehensive article on the status of Frequent Flyer Programs.
Some of his findings:
The world's 180 million frequent-flier members - many hold memberships in multiple programs - are earning miles faster than ever. Their accounts are brimming with 14.2 trillionmileage points, up from 6.6 trillion at the end of 2000, estimates Randy Petersen, publisher of InsideFlyer magazine and WebFlyer.com. Frequent fliers earned 2.7 trillion credits in 2005 alone.
Reed also reported that while people are earning more points, airlines are giving fewer away.
Henry Harteveldt, an analyst at Forrester Research, says only 26% of North Americans who buy their travel online - and most of them do - profess loyalty to one carrier. Harteveldt says that frequent-flier programs have become "golden handcuffs" in which "elite status becomes a disincentive to change rather than an incentive to stay."
What went wrong? Well according to Rolfe Shellenberger, the marketing executive who brought the first frequent flyer program to American Airlines, they got "greedy."
Their purpose now is to generate more revenue" in the short term rather than maintain and build customer loyalty that will financially benefit the company over the long term, he says.
Indeed, U.S. airlines generated $4 billion in additional revenue last year by selling mileage points to partner companies at prices of up to 2 cents per mile. The partner - a credit card company, a car dealer or a mortgage firm, for example - will then use the points to reward their customers for purchases.
As it turns out Northwest is not the only carrier who sees the world as a much smaller place.According to Lilia Eflimora sharing a comment on Nancy's blog.
Nancy, could be legitimate reduce for the cheaper tickets. KLM resently changed to that: e.g. most of my latest flights to Russia were credited with 25% miles just because I had cheapest tickets. No gold wings anymore :(
