You do not need to buy a Flexi/Freedom fare to use Fly Ahead, an Elevate fare is all that is required for Fly Ahead.
I fully understand the rules surrounding the Fly Ahead benefit, but I was responding to this comment:
High spending customers wouldn't need the fly ahead benefit, as they would have the flexibility to change anyway.
In the
absence of the Fly Ahead benefit, the only customers that can change without penalty on the day of travel are those on Flexi fares - hence my reference to Flexi fares in my response. In any case, while you are correct that under the new rules Fly Ahead can be used on an Elevate fare, I can't buy Elevate fares for work travel either unless there is no Getaway fare available, as to do so would still be paying more for flexibility, which the travel policy specifically prohibits. That's the whole problem that has been discussed at length in this thread.
If all of your 40k is on Gateway fares, you are not a high margin customer as these are very low margin fares.
You're confusing various different issues here. Firstly, the comment about "high spending customers" was part of a discussion about the wisdom (or not) of VA's decision to introduce changes to fare structures and status benefits a few months ago. As such, this relates to the time before Elevate/Getaway fares even existed. Similarly, at the risk of stating the obvious, my spend over 3 previous membership years also related to a time before Elevate/Getaway fares existed.
Also, you refer to "high margin customer", but that is quite different to "high spending customer". As I already alluded to in my previous post, I know that others would have been higher
margin customers than I was. However, to what extent can an airline rely on people that are high margin but low volume customers? For example, the customer who always flies with QF where possible, but on the rare occasion when VA is the only option he flies on a Flexi or J fare? My suspicion is that those kind of people aren't going to keep VA afloat. Obviously VA would love to have loads of customers who fly very regularly with them
and buy the more expensive fare classes all the time, but again I suspect there are not a whole lot of those people out there, and I don't think their recent changes will "encourage" very many people to start buying more expensive fare classes - especially now that QF often have cheaper fares than VA.
BTW, I don't think I was a particularly low margin customer either. I just went through my VA confirmation emails, and of my last 10 VA domestic fares that I booked before these changes came in (all Saver fares), the average cost was over $200 per sector.
The fact is, for people who fly at peak times and can't book well in advance, even the Saver fares were rarely very cheap. I also travel OS a bit in J and almost always used VA partners and credited to Velocity, although I have no idea how much money VA/Velocity make out of that. Anyway, as I said earlier in the thread, I don't think VA decided that customers like me are not worth retaining. I think they naively assumed that when the changes came in I would still fly with them just as often, but pay more for my fares. If so, they were wrong (in my case at least), as I have only flown with VA once since September.
apparently "X" is not eligible. Consistently inconsistent.
