What is The Point of Airmiles?

I have over the years, off and on, saved airmiles - the BA focused customer loyalty scheme. I have tens of thousands of the things. Yet, it is only when you actually try to do something with them that you realise they really are pretty useless.

This year I have travelled a lot on BA through work, and the odd bit of leisure. For a while I made a conscious effort to stick with them as I thought travel would be a lot easier through Terminal 5 and I would indeed build up airmiles that might get me to a Silver Card or I could use them on a holiday. I have must admit that I have travelled enough this year to become an expert on every terminal except four and most European airports. I can say that Terminal 5 is pretty good - it's very accessible from the M25 if you can avoid the roadworks, there's plenty of room at setdown, a good carpark and there are reasonable bus routes serving it if you don't mind endless stops. Trains are fine if you are coming from London - other than that, then forget it.

Quite big things let it down. Staff shortage is the first. That is at both security check in and passport control. It's like being a local Budgens - they wait until the queues are so long that people are snaking all over the place and back into the terminal before they even consider opening up a second or third machine and there are always ones not being used. Meanwhile at passport control it's just an ugly mess and a big scrum - in fact, at every terminal. It's a real shame after so much money and effort when into it. Going through any airport in Germany you simply do not get those sorts of queues or daft bottlenecks, there are always plenty of machines or stalls open and loads of staff. The throughput is much faster too and that has nothing to do with the severity of checks, it is simply staff more interested in getting the queues down and more of them.

Enough of those gripes - back to blinking airmiles. I read with some eagerness that BA has opened a direct route to Las Vegas and next year for my brother-in-law's 40th birthday we are going there. The big problem I have found with airmiles is that they are not a real 'currency'. For instance, if you want to upgrade to Club Europe, it's the same airmiles for an hour's trip as a long haul upgrade. Dumb. The second thing is, it's actually quite hard to spend them. We are one of those families who have to grab time when we can and even if we could plan a trip, we would usually buy a package holiday of some sort. So airmiles would be handy for grabbing those trips of whim. But there is fat chance of you getting the dates you want.

It is a Ryan Air approach that says that one type of traveller only gets cheap fares, all others pay accordingly and expensively for their needs. BA airmiles are the same - unless you are flexible to an amazing degree, it's highly unlikely you will get a flight to suit. And this is not just on one occasion - my airmiles have not been spent for nearly 3 years and yet I try regularly to get flights with them.

So Vegas next June sounded ideal. I now had dates a year ahead, could be flexible by about 3 days and I needed hotels too. Wallop. I could possibly get a flight 10 days after the dates needed and then coming back would mean nearly a fortnight stay which was not ideal for a planned 4 night trip. I didn't even get to investigating a hotel.

I then made the mistake of phoning the Executive Club to see if there was a mistake. Nope. No airmiles seats were available for that flight any time around the dates. The phoneperson said that it was a very busy route - so busy it has yet to start flying, I mentioned. Ah, there had been high demand. Right, that's why I could buy the tickets by the bucket load from any website including BA's, I suppose. Ah, said the person, there are only a few airmiles seats allocated to each flight and therefore they sell out early. Given the route has yet to launch and was only just featured in HighLife Magazine, that was pretty quick indeed. In answer to my question, why are the airmiles seats limited to so few, the person said that they had to make a profit.

At this point I did not hold my peace. I asserted that the whole point of a customer loyalty scheme is that customers already have paid for tickets upon which BA accrues a certain amount of profit which is set aside to pay for these future flights. I can see the point of trying to limit them but by making the number so low, and therefore the scheme so inflexible, people like me would get exasperated and therefore think the scheme is valueless. Put simply, if you cannot redeem the airmiles, then they are worthless. Just to make matters worse, when I tried to use them for the same dates on non-direct routes and via partner airlines, the same answer came up.

So out of sheer morbid interest, I looked at several websites and airlines, every one of them was cheaper for direct and indirect routes to Las Vegas. In the end, we looked at two great deals via Air France and Virgin that got us 4 nights at the Bellagio Hotel and the whole package was cheaper than an indirect flight with a BA partner, using mostly airmiles to pay for the flights and having to fly over week later. Just to be clear, as Robert Peston would say, it was more expensive using a customer loyalty program and less flexible than the alternatives, one of which was a direct flight.

I could have commented that BA is losing shed loads of money and it is simply driving customers away as, frankly speaking, if I can avoid BA in the future, I will. The rules on accruing Tier Points are stupid and Virgin does not have such a stupid and complex scheme nor do most other airlines. Finally, all the others, in my experience, fall over backwards to help you spend the loyalty points.

After all, that is the entire point of the scheme. Perhaps it may dawn on BA management that if their loyalty scheme is not incentivising loyalty then they are giving away money for no reason to fund it. However, if they give the profit away in the spirit of customer retention, do not make it difficult to redeem the points.

It's pretty simple really. Vegas here we come - and not via BA.

A Sign of The Times?

I always remember Terminal 2 at Heathrow on a Monday morning for having security queues the length of the terminal and then back round on itself and check-ins fuller than a Wagamama queue at Saturday lunchtime in St Albans. This Monday morning, 12 January, there were no queues - anywhere. Is this a sign of the times?

Travel Industry Being Hit?

I know BA announced good profits last quarter and both Ryan Air and EasyJet still talk bullishly, but this morning, for the second time in less than a few weeks, I have been shocked by the small numbers of people at Heathrow Airport. I wonder if anyone else has observed the same or am I just lucky on timing?

I have some acquaintances in the travel industry and there is no doubt that leisure travel is significantly down with one major travel firm I know experiencing a 40% drop in revenue although conversely their profits had held good.

If my experience is anything to go by, my 6.00am Alitalia Flight to Rome this morning had absolutely no queue at the check-in, no queue at security and less than 25 people on the flight, including the attendants. We got away on time and arrived in Rome early. I can't remember the last time that ever happened to me on a Monday morning - even the traffic heading into Heathrow was very light.

The Terminal 5 Effect?

After the fiasco of Terminal 5's pathetic start up last year, perhaps the collective easing at Terminals 1 & 2 is now visible - I doubt it. In my experience, with the lack of automatic check-ins for most continental airlines, the check-in counters at Alitalia are usually mobbed an hour before the flight by cackling people in expensive suits or ski outfits. So having packed hand luggage only and checked-in the night before, I arrived far too early and could have had an extra 30 minutes in bed.

However, Dunn's Law of Consequential Effect, would have come in to play. This Law states that if you believe that any one of the following are true 1) the traffic will be light, 2) check-ins not full or 3) security queues not long, then if you allow less than rush hour times to get to the airport, then automatically all 3 assumptions will be wrong resulting in lateness equalling the cube of your delayed start time. This has been verified by extensive results in live experiments causing several missed flights and journeys of great stress.

Empty Economy, Packed Business Class

No this is not the title of some fantastical Chinese film. One curious observation of this morning's flight, was that the small, cramped section of Business Class of just 3 rows at the front were full, while the rest of us 'nose-pickers' spread ourselves out luxuriously in Economy Class for the 2 hour flight. Quite how firms can justify Business Class fares costing at least treble the price of economy on such short trips is beyond me, particularly in a recession. But then again I have always believed this for short hops. It's just companies adding to the perks of short-hop managers who are probably finding any excuse to be on a plane in order to look busy while accruing their tiered points for Executive Club so they can have nice holidays and get promoted to Gold next year - maybe even that BA Amex Card they all dream of. And it's not only greedy Bankers, lawyers and Accenture employees at that game. I once flew to Dusseldorf when the ENTIRE Business Class section was taken up by Vodafone employees, several of whom turned up to the meeting I was attending, which was ironic as I was pitching on webconferencing to help reduce their travel costs.

It struck me, as we landed at Rome, that perhaps Alitalia might have broken even on the empty flight thanks to those generous people in Business Class paying well over the odds for their tickets.

Good News for Emissions, Bad News for The Economy

The boom in continental air travel thanks to the likes of Taxless citizens like Stelios, has helped fuel the economy while transporting all those who leveraged their equity to buy a second property at the end of some obscure route. It was all part of the 'cause and effect' spiral of the boom in the last 10 years. Empty planes actually do nothing to help reduce carbon emissions but they do impact the economy as airlines like Alitalia, already a perrenial flirter with bankruptcy, may well have to start reducing flights if they cannot fill enough seats to make money. While this may be a welcome relief to those who are concerned with carbon emissions, it does mean the economy must be suffering all round.

Still, if I get another line of seats to myself on the way back, I shan't be complaining.