Thank you to the 1,368 subscribers who responded to our survey last month.
Not surprisingly more than half of those who responded said they've lost confidence in frequent flyer programs and 11% are no longer interested in the schemes.
Diners Club and Westpac members spoke out loudly, 34% and 23% respectively have (or plan to) cut up their membership cards! A whopping 84% are dissatisfied with the way Diners handled the loss of Global Rewards points, while 85% were unhappy with Westpac's approach to the crisis.
On a more positive note, Westpac's new Altitude program seems to be well regarded by our readers, with almost half the respondents believing it to be an improvement over the old program. Given the hostile consumer environment in which the program was launched, this is a remarkable achievement.
Also a little surprising was the decision by almost 40% of Ansett's Global Rewards members to join frequent flyer programs of other Star Alliance airlines such as Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand and United Airlines. The decision by 12% to join Air New Zealand showed that despite former Ansett customers' anger many still preferred to stick with the airline widely blamed for contributing to Ansett's demise. Singapore's KrisFlyer has come in from the cold - 10% of our readers are now members of this program, up from virtually zero six months ago.
ANZ offers the most popular rewards program with 43% of those surveyed signed up with that bank. Close behind is Westpac (40%), followed by American Express (35%) and Diners (29%).
The complete set of survey results is available and can be
downloaded here. You
will need Adobe Acrobat to view this PDF file. If you do not have Acrobat,
you can download a free copy directly from the
Adobe website.
Our bulletin board has been running hot with responses to the survey. Here's just some of the comments our readers had to make:
- about Westpac's Altitude program receiving a better response than Diners Club:
"I guess the difference is that Diners used to give 1.5 pts per dollar and now only 1 pt per dollar. Westpac has always been 1 to 1.
"With the extra negative factor, it's not surprising that users doesn't view the new Diners program as an improvement."
- about Singapore Airlines frequent flyer program KrisFlyer:
"It would be to Singapore Airlines advantage if they were to partner with an Australian credit card provider."
- about those loyal to Air NZ, despite its role in Ansett's collapse:
"I can't believe that people have been joining Air NZ FF programs. Air NZ caused the Ansett
problem in the first place and may not be around for too long anyway.
Obviously they want to go through this all again."
The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Herald Sun and
The Age have run stories about consumer loyalty in the light of our
survey. See Press Reports for
more details.
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