Will you still earn/retain Velocity status beyond 2025?

[blackcat20]

I know VA lurk here so I’m going to make it clear. People are walking away from your program. Including me. I have close to 10000 LTG status credits and am a multi year platinum.

Qantas dropped a DSC promo yesterday which is making retaining any residual loyalty to your program very difficult. No response from VA.

You have a limited lounge network and confusing partners yet are positioning your program value proposition as if it’s superior to QF. VA used to be about 80 percent of QF in terms of pricing but the value proposition added up. Now it doesn’t. Your partners either have removed J availability or now have huge copayments.

You’ve created a loyalty program where it’s very easy to work out the value proposition - $9600 for platinum isn’t worth it. Let alone $18000 for 3/4 of Plat+ (needing another 500SC from somewhere else). The changes have also distorted the original intent of Family Pooling which was a genuine point of difference from QF.

I used to only look at VA and partners - not any more.

The only thing that got me genuinely excited in terms of loyalty - the prospect of Plat+ access to the Beyond lounge - is apparently a mistake.

Agree. We've both gone from platinum to silver, cancelled our VA Amex (x2). Family pooling made it great for our family but now all our forward bookings are on QF

 

[simmomelb]

Agree. We've both gone from platinum to silver, cancelled our VA Amex (x2). Family pooling made it great for our family but now all our forward bookings are on QF

At least you can still earn 50% of your status from family pooling to maintain/attain Gold or Plat with VA. That's still a huge help to make it a whole lot easier and cheaper.
Luckily they didn't remove family pooling.

 

[antycbr]

At least you can still earn 50% of your status from family pooling to maintain/attain Gold or Plat with VA. That's still a huge help to make it a whole lot easier and cheaper.
Luckily they didn't remove family pooling.

Have a look at the implications for lifetime status, and the retrospective loss of status credits from people who made pooling decisions in good faith.

 

[antycbr]

To repeat/be a broken record, I'd suspect they will be some changes that will be dialled down but I think VFF's intent of removing those FFs that only use VFF for International Long Haul partner travel (and little to no actual VA flying) I'd suspect is going to stick, as those don't bring much if any $ into the VA flying side, and goes with VA's aims of being a primary 'domestic carrier'.

Easiest way to fix that is reduce SC earn on partners and increase number of VA coded flights for each tier.

Of course that looks bad compared to what QF do (although QF doesn’t like SCs for QR for some reason) so they did this instead.

 

[antycbr]

The FY25 results hit the ASX this morning. Velocity has added 900,00 new members in the last financial year and had a 12% growth in active members.

H

Post in thread 'Virgin FY25 results'

Today at 9:30 AM

Documents have hit the ASX.

FY25 result overview

• Pro forma underlying NPAT: $331m (up 27.8% on FY24)
• $479m Statutory NPAT (Down 12.3% on FY24)
• Pro forma underlying EBIT: $650m (up 29.6% on FY24)
• Revenue: $5,810m (up 8.5% on FY24)
• Pro forma underlying EBIT margin: 11.2% (up 1.8% on FY24)

Airline segment overview

• Underlying EBIT: $535m (up $143m on FY24)
• Underlying EBIT margin: 9.6% (up from 7.6% on FY24)
• ASK growth: 4.2%
• RASK growth: 4.0%
• Load Factor: 84.9% (up from 83.0% on FY24)
• On Time Performance: 76.8% (up from 69.6% on FY24)...

• Harrison_133

Full briefing doc here.

There might be some people walking away but it looks like plenty more are coming in.
I think it's easy to forget that we're a tiny niche cohort, and not representative of the flying public at large.

But the customer that has 10000 SC walking away is a lot more than a customer that pays for a Lite fare basis fare. Both count as “active members”. All programs should be expanding just from population growth.

These numbers also don’t show the people who are now splitting their travel spend, doing what they need to maintain a lower level than before and directing revenue to QF that was previously solely heading to VA.

 

[simmomelb]

Have a look at the implications for lifetime status, and the retrospective loss of status credits from people who made pooling decisions in good faith.

Well aware of all that. Still advantageous having pooling. Making it much easier to retain Gold and Plat for most.

 

[JK1964]

At least you can still earn 50% of your status from family pooling to maintain/attain Gold or Plat with VA. That's still a huge help to make it a whole lot easier and cheaper.
Luckily they didn't remove family pooling.

Exactly why we are sticking with VA. Only one of us will be plat rather than both of us, but we’ll still both get lounge access and row 3 as long as we’re travelling together.

 

[simmomelb]

Exactly why we are sticking with VA. Only one of us will be plat rather than both of us, but we’ll still both get lounge access and row 3 as long as we’re travelling together.

And I love that, because for someone like me that almost always travels with others, that means we both get the same benefits (frequently travelling with those that I pool with).
If you don't like that, then don't pool (that's the beauty of it being optional) .
If you don't like to pool, then Qantas is perfect (no option to pool status). So that might be better for a lot of those types of passengers.

 

[SYD]

Of course that looks bad compared to what QF do (although QF doesn’t like SCs for QR for some reason) so they did this instead.

OT, but QR earn with QF is purely geography. Yes, the “Simpler & Fairer” (TM) tables probably were constructed to disadvantage flying partners via the ME (rather than QF codes on EK). But because the Oz-DOH is long and the DOH-Europe sector is short, it earns disproportionately lower than say CX via HKG ie the first sector earns about 50% of a QF code and the 2nd sector earns about 75% of a QF coded flight.

If you could book a BA or IB codeshare on QR metal DOH-SYD, it would still earn the same as QR code.

The anomaly, QR earn PER-DOH is better than SYD/MEL/BNE-DOH…

But didn’t VA do some “S&F” of their own? Reducing SC earn on partners?