That's a great point. I am very much a novice in this big points game, and the only reason I started to question why was I using points for economy redemption's was over the last few years as airline competition has ramped up significantly and fare prices have therefore dropped a lot - you can usually get a return economy ticket with some airlines for not much more then some redemption costs of carriers!
But, there are still many many many people out there tat don't care. I have lots of friends that just slowly accumulate points and see them as a 'free' benefit of spending money anyhow, so they don't care even if they only get a minor benefit from redeeming them in economy as they were 'free' to begin with.
Exactly my point. Or is that points?
Consider Joesephine Average flyer, with or without family, flies rarely, maybe gets some points from shopping, CC's and the odd flight. Will never get status(and wouldn't know or care what a Status Credit was) and so on, but slowly pool up say 50k points and think yeah we'll use them to visit xyz in Darwin or something. Probably wouldn't even consider looking at J or anything. It's something they see as hey let's use them.. and there's nothing wrong with that at all. These are the sorts of people who the QF store (aka toasters and ipads) appeal to. I'm not in any way trying to put this segment of QFF members down in any way... it's just not reasonable to expect to get the points balances to significantly aim for your F reward to London or something for the vast majority of the membership (and thank goodness given there's enough of us in that pool already!). Some of these members are just as likely to have relatively small amounts of points expire and go unnoticed (or uncared about) too.
I have a good friend who, some years back when QF was at a rather low point, share price hovering around $1 and the talk was doom and gloom, who thought that's it, QF is doomed, I'm convering my 190k (something like that) points to woolies vouchers to at least use rather than lose. Now most of us would roll our eyes at that (I had a minor meltdown on her behalf when she told me what she'd done!) but you know what? she was happy with her choice.
I guess I'm trying to say that there are so many different perspectives and targets out there for people looking to use points... sure, the majority of the interested members of AFF are after those hard to find premium awards, upgrades etc - many of us have experience, play the points game, have status and expectations.. but the reality is in the Loyalty World, we're the small minority of the customer base. If Joe Avcerage can take the kids to Dreamworld on JQ during the school hols on points earned over 4 years that's a huge win for them and they're happy. So the system offering Y seats or combined rewards, or indirect routings may work out very well for some people, and not others - the real issue from my point of view is how CLEAR the provider (in this case QF) is about things like "Your flight from Sydney to Los Angeles will be in Econony" on a supposed ADL-LAX Business Class reward... we know to look and be careful.. some others might get caught out and that stuff annoys me. but that's an aside.
Not everyone has the same goals in the game of points....
with planned travel I should have that rectified by Xmas !!
