This was the interesting part for me
This suggests…
high demand periods are created by lots of occasional flyers wanting to fly during the same short period
This is NOT helped by the States staggering their school holiday periods on different weeks creating an.elongated price hike time period.
So the conversation goes something like
“Well we got all these points over several years (slow earners) and how can we use them? It seems to be pointless holding onto them because that means they’d be worth NOTHING at all so we may as well buy rewards tickets on the dates we want them. Sure we have to spend more than the lowest possible price but that’s just the cost of doing business to”
“get the seats when we want them”
Otherwise FOMO
and we’d have to pay even more if we had to “pay cash” for them if we wait any longer to buy them …
And
“We can only afford this holiday because we have the points. Otherwise, we would not be going”
The big question is if this provides Repeat customers…
If people feel they got a “good deal”. Sure they may keep going
If they feel they got a bad deal, exit stage right after the rewards tics are bought because it’s likely to have used up most of the points balance anyway.
As usual large corps “didn’t think it through” to the level one might expect this upsetting a lot of people as they fail to recognise that loyalty is a two way street. It’s not just on one side of the fence. Reciprocation matters. I do think the whole downgrading reward perks over the years now is dumb
This removing DSC from counting for Life Time Flying status takes the cake and effectively consigns QFF to be an instant gratification Revenue Model based affair because you now need to spend even more. In one fell swoop After a particularly lousy year from the customer perspective (data breach, devaluation of both earn and redeem, need I go on ?) you double up the required spend to make Life time anything. That smacks of Dumb critical thinking