For those old enough to remember S&H Green Stamps, they were a
bribe to keep the customer shopping at the same store. Eventually
all stores offered them. I was not old enough to figure-out why the economics
failed, but all of the redemption stores eventually closed and customers forgot about
them.
More than 25 years ago, American Airlines introduced the AAvantage
Frequent Flyer program. It is a huge success because
it instilled passenger loyalty to a specific airline. Today, all airlines
offer almost identical frequent flyer programs.
I have traveled over 1,000,000 real air miles (not
earned on credit cards, hotels, car
rentals, mortgages, etc.), am a gold card holder on Northwest and
get some pretty special treatment. However, when most people try to redeem
frequent flyer miles, it's almost impossible to get where they want to go when
they
want to go unless you plan very far ahead (11 months) or are very
flexible. Accepting frequent
flyer miles is like buying a "pig in a poke." You really have no
idea of the cost of what you will be buying with the miles. There are rarely
seats available without invoking the "spend extra miles" option. That
means spending more miles to get a seat. I call that
"moving the goal posts" because it deflates the value of your miles by
50%. The airlines argue that there are so many
more ways to earn frequent flyer miles, you should expect to pay more miles
for your "free" ticket. Can you say "frequent flyer mileage
deflation" boys and girls?
The NW web site is one of the best in the
business. It allows you to make (or shall I say "attempt" to make)
reservations using frequent flyer miles. Funny thing about it, if you use the
standard miles rule, there are rarely any seats available. Yes,
they will be happy to sell you a seat or take twice the number of miles but
it's darn hard to find a seat (how about enough seats for the entire family?). You
try for your first date, then the second, then the third, etc. You then can
try to find a seat over the next seven days. You get the
idea. If you find a seat for the outbound portion of your trip, good luck
finding a seat for the return. I'm a pretty slow learner but eventually I got
the idea. They don't want to make any free seats available. I usually call the
special "elite member" phone number for help. That costs them both
phone line charges and labor costs. The very nice phone agent has some special
software at her disposal. I asked when the next date was that had any seat
available. Eventually she found something on a date and a time that was
totally inconvenient (I can't imagine how hard it is for the
"regular" customers to find seats).
If you have full disclosure, we will know the value of our frequent flyer
miles to be able to make informed buying decisions. Otherwise, NW will
continue to convince us that we should try to use our green stamps to go to
Peoria in the winter rather than Paris in the summer. I've never been an
advocate of anything big or governmental (together the two are dangerous) but
I believe it's time for frequent flyer seat availability full-disclosure.
