Article: Airline Status Officially Makes People Spend More

[Lynda2475]

End of this month I will have QF Platinum for another 12 months.

I have 20 SCs worth of planned travel for next year and already thinking how cheaply I can get 1180 SCs to maintain Platinum. Why? Warped thinking or some magic spell. I have Lifetime Gold and no need to maintain Platinum other than to say "I'm Platinum"....

Well if you are a May or June FF year end then you will get another nice roll-over of Status support.

If like me you are a end July or later FF year then no status support and yes have to find a way to earn the remaining SCs if it is important to you. However unless you are planning to fly long-haul a few time on OW airlines or be needing release of reward seats, its likely not worth it if you are already LTG.

 

[dajop]

There's also a cost side to this as well as the revenue side. On one hand an airline can command price premiums, but on the other they can also reduce costs by degrading the product/service offering knowing that all sins will be forgiven if people are handcuffed to you through a loyalty program.

 

[JohnK]

Well if you are a May or June FF year end then you will get another nice roll-over of Status support.

If like me you are a end July or later FF year then no status support and yes have to find a way to earn the remaining SCs if it is important to you. However unless you are planning to fly long-haul a few time on OW airlines or be needing release of reward seats, its likely not worth it if you are already LTG.

Yes frequent flyer year ends this month.

I will more than likely keep doing 3-4 trips each year to Thailand. 1-2 trips may be on Qantas or Oneworld but more than likely trips will be on SQ to try and maintain VA Gold.

I've been giving this a lot of thought as I've been Platinum since 2007. At this stage I cannot justify trying to qualify Platinum for 2-3 visits to F lounge. Domestic lounges very little difference between Business Lounge and Qantas club lounge.

 

[ols]

reduce costs by degrading the product/service offering knowing that all sins will be forgiven if people are handcuffed to you through a loyalty program.

IHG do this all the time

 

[levelnine]

IHG do this all the time

And at a certain point there's a straw that breaks the camel's back, and people start leaving en masse. So it is a delicate balancing act.

Now that IHG has lost Mr & Mrs Smith and proposed cuts to the Diamond breakfast offering, I'm certainly getting close to that point.

And, for example, if WP reduced, in practice, the availability of award seat release requests, I'd drop QF in a heart beat. There's no way the international F lounge/domestic J lounge is worth an extra 600SC a year of spend on QF in my opinion, especially if you are foregoing superior international J products to get those SC (ie flying QF rather than SQ, QR, EY, EK, etc*).

*Yes, you can earn SC on some of those carriers, but not at the same rate/cost as QF.

Once you break the camel's back, status starts to have the reverse effect (ie you start becoming loyal to a competitor!!).

 

[clifford]

I like to maintain OWE, but I don't care whether it's with QF or BA. Whichever is cheaper (in terms of $$$ and mental health).

Currently I'm BA Gold, but next year I will be QF Plat. It just turned out to be more convenient this time (perhaps something to do with Covid).

 

[JessicaTam]

Really interesting article! Thanks for drawing our attention to it @AFF Editor


I haven’t read the paper yet but I find the psychology around rewards so fascinating too. In particular, an unexpected reward being more motivating than something that becomes expected (I think I read an article or paper about that vs op-ups in the US, where the expectation of upgrades makes them less valuable).

One would think an airline would try to tease people on the threshold of making a run for that higher status with an unexpected bonus. Even just a personal welcome or minor gift on the flight, thank you for your recent (increased?) travel with us, here’s an extra chocolate. With the smarts in CRMs these days, it would be easy to identify someone with increased travel patterns, predict if they’re seeming sustained, and try to influence that behaviour.

I mean, with all the things my QFF number are connected to, Qantas probably know more about me than I do.

Paging @trippin_the_rift to the white courtesy phone!

 

[RooFlyer]

I have 500 rollover SCs sitting in my account and there they shall stay, lonely until I fly QF to SCL next December, as it was the only practical service available to me (at the time I booked). Hmmm ... actually I should credit to BA, shouldn't I?

 

[trippin_the_rift]

Elite status drives the endowment effect in our minds. It's a proven behavioural economical psychology effect. Here's a new interesting article how status (matches) drive at least 1 person insane (in a good way) Done Right, Airline Elite Status Makes People Insane

Both Qantas and Virgin's status programs are from early 2000's thinking, which applies less in today's world than it did back then.
I'd expect both airlines to totally redo their elite status programs soon, as I suspect they don't deliver the same kind of premium revenue spend-up that they did 10 or 20 years ago when the program structures were created.

 

[RooFlyer]

Done Right, Airline Elite Status Makes People Insane

That article notes

There’s an opportunity cost if I DON’T take a SkyTeam or Oneworld flight at the moment. Sure, I might save $200 by booking SkyTeam, but that fails to account for a variety of things people don’t instantly consider on the transaction, like…

• More Points Earned: thanks to higher points multipliers for customers with elite status flying the airline. An extra 10,000 miles could be worth $100 at a minimum.
• Unlocking Valuable One Time Benefits: hitting status goals can unlock elite benefits like international upgrade certificates or companion tickets, which can be worth many thousands.
• “Always On” Day Of Travel Perks: maintaining a good status can unlock lounges and fast tracks, even when flying on economy tickets. This is a valuable add for people who don’t always buy up to premium cabins.

Of those, I think 2 apply less to those striving to retain Qantas status. Points are of much less consequence because of the difficulty in using them to the effect most want (although this is probably appreciated only AFTER the points have been chased/earned) and of course the second doesn't apply.

Certainly for me, being a 15 yr QFF Plat walking away from them in a hissy fit is both liberating and money-saving.

 

[Skyring]

End of this month I will have QF Platinum for another 12 months.

I have 20 SCs worth of planned travel for next year and already thinking how cheaply I can get 1180 SCs to maintain Platinum. Why? Warped thinking or some magic spell. I have Lifetime Gold and no need to maintain Platinum other than to say "I'm Platinum"....

Lounge access isn't the be all of airline travel. The better class of lounges makes a big difference for me.

And one trip, being Platinum made a huge difference. It was the year of the volcano, and Finnair upgraded the wife and I from economy KIX-HEL because I had OWE status. Yes, that was nice and certainly worth a few bob, but the big perk came a few days later when we tried to fly out of Istanbul to Amsterdam via Heathrow.

The hotel limo dropped us off and we joined the BA check-in queue. I couldn't help but notice a lot of passengers standing around with their luggage looking worried. Oh well, I thought, I'll find out soon enough, and lined up at the priority check-in.

Look, she said, the flight's been cancelled but we can get you two on a direct flight to Amsterdam with Turkish Airlines, is that okay?

I had no great interest in visiting Heathrow just so I could go through immigration there for a short A320 ride in the back of the Flugzug, so I said, sure, that'd be great.

So we did. A flight full of frazzled Turks but we made it and possibly we were the last plane in to Schipol before it all shut down for ten days.

The convention in Amsterdam was the main reason for the trip, and missing that would have been a bummer. Not that Istanbul is a bad place to spend time and we could always have returned home because there was no volcano dust in that direction. Our LONE4 tickets were taking us home via Chicago and San Francisco so we probably would have waited.

Or tried to find some Orient Express or epic car rental odyssey across Europe to get to Amsterdam. As it was we took a trip to Switzerland after the convention, five of us wedged in a Golf including two plus-sized Americans and a skinny but love-crazed Pom. And all our luggage. Gosh that was an interesting four days.

Anyway, the point of all this is that my OWE status got us on that flight into Amsterdam and saved a lot of trouble and time and money. A few drinks and snacks in a lounge are all very well but when it came to the crunch British Airways spared us a thought.

 

[tdimdad]

A few drinks and snacks in a lounge are all very well but when it came to the crunch British Airways spared us a thought.

Exactly my sentiments and why I'm thinking of spending extra to hop to an upper rung on the ladder to test it out. Lounge vs airport concourse - yes, please. Free food before a flight - yes, please. Priority services - why not. But the biggest gain I see is in the continuity of a trip in case of any disruptions, i.e. the pattern that the airlines first treat their own elites & premium pax and partner status before the rest 300 are organised to their onward journeys.

BTW, the mental image of your five in that Golf on a road trip made me chuckle. Thanks for the laughs!

 

[Skyring]

BTW, the mental image of your five in that Golf on a road trip made me chuckle. Thanks for the laughs!

The two lovers sat in front and after a while I sat in the middle in the back, hip to hip, because if I had a window seat one of my cheeks went to sleep.
The hardest part was parking on a busy morning Amsterdam bikepath just outside the central area while I tried to fit all the bags in and a policewoman glared at me. Talk about Jenga!