How many status miles between a frequent flyer and an Air Canada executive?


My family and friends, still after all these years, can't get their heads around the idea of, for example, going to Australia for a day. Or Boston for a weekend. Or even Calgary for lunch. To them all of those places are on the other side of the world, and take money piled high on ages of time to get there, nevermind getting back.

On the other hand, they think nothing of the 8+ hours it takes to get from Victoria to Kamploops by car. So going to Kamploops for the weekend makes perfect sense. The 4 hours and $60 or more each way on the ferry, the now gone $10 toll each way on the Coquihalla, the gallons of gas and hours of driving seem like nothing.

But the fact that I once spent less than $300 and a couple of upgrades to fly in business class from Vancouver to Boston and back, with each journey taking less than 7 hours from home to hotel and back -- well, that's still a conundrum to them.

It's just the remarkable benefit of technology that makes both time and distance evaporate. To me, Australia is no more distant than Abbotsford, especially since I'll spend 8-10 hours of it sleeping, and the rest having a night out for dinner and a movie. Yes, if you have the right technology, "far, far way" no longer exists. At least not physically.

But what I've seen over the years, particularly recently, suggests to me that the distance between a frequent flyer and an airline executive is more stellar in nature -- sort of like those stars whose light you are just now seeing originated billions of years ago. Distances that, no matter what Star Trek might cause you to hypothesize, will never be covered by humans. Instead, we can only imagine what goes on in those distant places.

Sort of like wondering what goes on in the minds of airline executives. They keep doing things that seem to make no sense whatsoever. I'm not even talking about the upcoming 30% increase in IKK award costs, but about things that really I don't even care about, like lifetime status for example.

It's long been my view that if your market is asking you for something, you don't say no. You figure out how to make money from it and then shout a boisterous yes.

Over the years there's been an ongoing and sometimes excited debate about lifetime status. In the end, AC execs always seem to come down on the side of "no." They have all sorts of reasons, some of which have been explained to, well, the FT AC community, at least. But the reasons all seem so bogus.

There's the "card collector" argument -- that the FFer will just fly AC long enough to get the "lifetime status" card, then move on to the next program to collect the next card. But so what if that was the case? In the mean time, you get extra business you might not otherwise have received. And again, so what if they abandon your airline them minute they get their card? What does it cost you? Damn near nothing over the one time cost of sending a metaphorical thank you for a million miles of business, that's it.

Then there's the "it'll keep costing us" argument. But that one makes no sense from the get go. If you structure the lifetime status award properly, then the only time it's going to cost you is if the cardholder is still flying your airline -- that is, paying you money for tickets. If you were to grant someone lifetime lounge access, for example, but only when flying your own airline, what does it cost you? If they don't fly your airline, it costs you nothing at all. If they do use the lounge, then it means they've also given you some more business, that again might have gone elsewhere.

And that's very likely. Even if someone has flown lots of miles on your airline and enjoyed all kinds of perks from being a frequent flyer, their loyalty will evaporate in an instant if they no longer have status and are unlikely to again earn it, as might be the case of someone who has recently retired. If they just become another pallet of self-loading-cargo, they might as well go on the cheapest or most convenient flight regardless of which airline offers it.

I use this example because not only is it a good illustration, but also because I really don't care. I have no interest at all in lifetime status other than as an academic exercise. I figure once I'm done flying, then I'm really done flying. Not flying for 7 months in a row last year convinved me of that even more than I already was. So I have no vested interest in lifetime status or not. So I can unhook myself from this issue.

But I do have other issues, like the fact that upgrading on AC is a joke. As I've often and even recently mentioned, I'd happily pay $4000 or maybe even $5000 for a ticket to Australia if there was reasonable upgrade space management. But when I see J1 C1 Z0 I1 on a flight a few days hence, and then see J9 C9 Z9 I0 on flights for many days both before and after, I can't help but believe that the entity responsible has a brain like those "sports brains" that have been in the news lately. The ones with serious damage.

We're not talking an either/or situation here. I'm not for a minute demanding more upgrade space or I'll not fly your airline. On the contrary, I'm still flying the same airline. And I'm still upgrading, on every flight. The only difference is I'm paying a lot less. It takes more management on my part, sometimes much more, but I'm doing it. It also generates some stress, though not nearly as much as it once did.

My trip next week is a good example. I'd happily have bought a latitude fare for about $4000, but I have no expectation of any reasonable or rational amount of upgrade space in the future. So instead I buy the dirt cheap "bottom-feeding" fare of about $1600 all in, but only when I know for certain I can upgrade the outbound flight. Then I pick an approximate return date, and prepare myself to spend $150 or even $300 to make a change or two, and maybe a few extra dollars on a car and hotel. If need be, I'll even burn up a bit of vacation of banked time, and enjoy my mini-holiday. (Why not? People save for a lifetime for that one big trip to somewhere like Australia and still never see or experience as much of it as I have. Yet I get to go there essentially for free, on a regular basis.)

So I don't get it. The distance between and airline executive's view of the frequent flyer world is so different from the actual frequent flyer world, it seems that distance will never be covered, no matter what type of plane you have, or even how many technical stops you make along the way.

Or maybe Star Trek wasn't so far off the mark after all. Physicists tell us that there might actually be ways to move from one place in the universe to another in time spans short enough to defy the universe's most adamant constant -- the speed of light.

Maybe the way is to fold space or find a worm hole or whatever it is that physicists do, to bring an airline executive into the frequent flyer's world. One way would be to make them travel the same way. That is, all management and executive employees must travel the same way we do -- within a travel policy that might say lowest possible econo fare, or if they're lucky the lowest possible upgradable fare. They'd be given the same number upgrade certificates, the same lounge access rights, and so on. They'd have to earn their status the same way, book tickets and check-in the same way, and if they want to IKK their spouse overseas they'll have to pony up for a paid business class fare. In short, they'd live in our world, warts and all.

I'm guessing that there would be such complete, dramatic and almost instantaneous transformation, even physicists would have a hard time explaining how so much ground could be covered in so short a time.

Sort of like going to Australia for a day.

Live in your world. Fly in ours.

 

I think the union rules would make this a flat out impossibility. Besides which, we know that J will forever be full of AC folks. But maybe if we borrow the Heisenberg Compensator from Star Trek ...

 

Airline executives are unionized ?

 

Ken -- always enjoy reading your posts/threads. This one was no exception. Thanks!

 

thoughtful as always . . .

(now if the airline execs were even half as thoughtful!):-:

 

Another classic KH post.

Using the Star Trek analogy, I find my relationship with AC to travel at Warp Speed between love and hate. Just when I have had enough, they come out of the blue and do the unexpected....they treat me with respect....and then back to the.....

 

I have to admit, part of the charm of this forum is the whimiscal and thoughtfulness of some of the members posts, with KH's often setting the example. This one did not disappoint! ^

 

Sorry - I should have clarified. If the union rules for unionized workers stipulate J class, it's fair to assume that (non-unionized) Execs would get this perk as well.

Anyhow - good post Ken! Using ThreadTools at the top I've nominated this thread for TalkMail.

 

Only KH can come up with creative and unique thread titles, to boot

 

A fine read....

 

This thread has been highlighted in the current TalkMail

 

Famous at last!



And in other news, I successfully upgraded the return flight 6.5 days in advance, spent nothing extra, and flew home as I desired. Total expenditure: $1629.36 .

I guess in a weird quantum physics kind of way I should thank Air Canada for saving me about $3,000 by making it harder to upgrade.

 

A wonderful post. Funny and thoughtful. Yep, and it does seem hard to understand what most airline execs think. But then, there are a few startups that actually do seem to listen to their market (e.g., Southwest, JetBlue, maybe Virgin), but the executives in question probably consider them outsiders who don't understand the business.

 

"If they just become another pallet of self-loading-cargo, they might as well go on the cheapest or most convenient flight regardless of which airline offers it."
Absolutely right.
Awesome post.