NYTimes: For Frequent Fliers, Awards Seem Scarce

New York Times
June 22, 2004
BUSINESS TRAVEL

For Frequent Fliers, Awards Seem Scarce
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT

When Timothy Placek tried to cash in his miles to fly his daughter
from St. Louis to Houston last year, Continental Airlines told him no
seats were available.

Disappointed, Mr. Placek, who is a Silver Elite member of
Continental's frequent-flier program, asked whether he could use his
points to travel to Omaha, to visit his parents in January, four
months later. No award seats were available on any of those flights,
either.

Well, then, how about applying the miles to a family vacation he was
planning to the Philippines, an increasingly frustrated Mr. Placek
asked. Unfortunately, the airline replied, that would not be possible;
all standard mileage-award seats on those flights were also taken.

As his annoyance increased, a phone representative told him all was
not lost. He could use his miles for any of those excursions if he
were willing to spend twice as many as the standard 25,000 miles for a
round trip within the United States, or 50,000 miles for overseas
destinations. Continental's EasyPass program, she said, would make it
possible.

"I was disappointed," said Mr. Placek, a vice president for MicroMed
Technologies, Inc., a manufacturer of medical devices in Houston. "I
felt as if they were trying to steal my miles." He reluctantly booked
the flight for his daughter, but not for the other two trips that he
had wanted.

His distress is shared by many business travelers. A survey by
e-Rewards Inc., a consulting firm in Dallas that specializes in
loyalty programs, suggests that many airlines are quietly cutting the
number of seats available at the 25,000-mile redemption level while
promoting their costlier premium-redemption plans.

In the poll of loyalty-program members, 26 percent described their
recent experiences in booking award travel as "much more difficult" or
"virtually impossible," an increase of five percentage points from an
identical survey last year. About two out of every five travelers
reported that they had made premium redemptions in the last 12 months,
and half of those who did said they had felt they had no other choice.

Continental says it has not reduced the number of conventional award
seats available to its frequent fliers. Julie King, an airline
spokeswoman, says redemption rates are up 15 percent this year, with
standard rewards accounting for 75 percent of the total. Ms. King said
the higher redemption levels were meant to "give our customers more
flexibility when seats are in high demand."

But the double-or-nothing proposition has left many frequent travelers
- and some loyalty program experts - with a different impression.

"This amounts to a covert increase in award levels,'' said Tim
Winship, who publishes FrequentFlier.com, a Web site.

Mr. Winship said the changes made sense from the airlines' point of
view. After all, most major carriers are losing money and have a
reservoir of unredeemed miles that some industry analysts say could
top 10 trillion this year. But, he said, they ought to be forthright
about what they are doing.

"There's no disclosure about what's going on behind the scenes, no
transparency to the system," he said. "Consumers don't know what their
odds are of getting an award seat. It's an outrage.'' Even when
travelers try to work within the system, they are often foiled.

"I have had nearly zero luck in getting the award travel I wanted at
the lower mileage amount," said Dana Baldwin, a management consultant
in Ada, Mich. "I've tried making reservations more than nine months in
advance, tried flexible dates, different airports, leaving from
different cities and arriving at different destinations, all with
little luck.''

Mr. Baldwin believes that airline-capacity controls are limiting the
number of 25,000-mile awards on every flight to a few seats. That way,
he speculates, airlines can say they have them available.

That is not so, according to at least one airline. "Customers on
frequent-flier award tickets are occupying more seats now than they
were five years ago," said Mary Stanik, a spokeswoman for Northwest
Airlines. Indeed, the portion of the carrier's revenue passenger miles
- an industry term for the total number of miles flown by paying
passengers - on award tickets rose to 7.5 percent last year from 6.1
percent in 1999.

Maybe both are right. Bruce Mainzer, a former director for the
yield-management department at United Airlines - the office in charge
of matching prices with demand - says basic economics are at work. It
is not that carriers are somehow trying to cheat frequent fliers out
of the miles they have earned, he says, it is just that they quite
naturally choose to give priority to paying customers.

"Award seats are made available after all the other revenue-producing
demand is met - in other words, only excess capacity is allocated to
award travel demand,'' Mr. Mainzer said. "But now there's less
capacity, because airlines are more closely matching seat demand to
capacity.''

Competition from low-cost carriers is driving the trend, he says.
These upstarts mostly serve popular tourist destinations like Las
Vegas and Orlando, Fla., and to stay in the game, the big airlines
have to squeeze as many pennies as they possibly can from each seat.

"They've pulled back even more seat capacity in the markets where
award travel demand is the strongest,'' Mr. Mainzer said, "which is
why travelers often find that an award seat is completely
unavailable."

If that is the case, then why would seats always seem to be available
for people willing to spend double the miles on them? For the simple
reason that airlines classify them as revenue producing and thus
allocate more of them per flight than they do ordinary award seats,
which they consider freebies.

They also assume that any premium tickets they allot for high-demand
routes will be snapped up, Mr. Mainzer says. But he wonders if they
are forgetting about the deep-rooted human dread of being fleeced.

"I think a majority of travelers think to themselves, 'I'm a loser if
I have to redeem that many miles for a ticket,' '' he said.

At the very least, they are irritated by the prospect of shelling out
more points. Richard Puk, the president of Intelligraphics Inc., a
computer-graphics consulting firm in Carlsbad, Calif., did not have
that many miles. Last month, he says, he tried unsuccessfully to
redeem his Delta award miles for two tickets from San Diego to Rapid
City, S.D. "I started trying to book the trip in March,'' Mr. Puk
said, "and was never able to find any available award seats."

Delta told him he could have the tickets if he anted up 80,000 miles,
but he had accumulated only 50,000, he says. Instead, he purchased the
tickets for $300 apiece.

He is still angry. "I was very frustrated," he said. "In the past,
I've never had any trouble getting a seat for my miles. It's almost as
if Delta had restricted the number of award seats to the point where
no one could get any.''

The e-Rewards study found that Mr. Puk is in good company. Almost 44
percent of frequent travelers reported difficulty in booking an award
seat more than once last year. It also concluded that some business
travelers are skeptical about the future of loyalty programs (see
chart). But the biggest surprise to Bill Russo, the executive vice
president at e-Rewards, was that business travelers remained fiercely
loyal to their programs despite their misgivings. "People are saying
it's virtually impossible to book seats,'' Mr. Russo said. "People are
afraid their programs won't have any value. Yet more than half of the
respondents told us they're satisfied enough with their primary
program that they would recommend it.''

What is going on? "These are businesspeople, and they understand the
business reasons behind what the airlines are doing,'' Mr. Russo said.
"Of course, when times get better, it's reasonable to think that
they'd expect the airlines to make reward redemption easier than it is
now.''


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/bu.../22redeem.html

Clipped from article:
"They've pulled back even more seat capacity in the markets where
award travel demand is the strongest,'' Mr. Mainzer said, "which is
why travelers often find that an award seat is completely
unavailable."

I called in January to redeem frequent flier miles for a trip to Aruba in
October and was told there were
no available seats. The seats are taken up by the time-share people who go
to Aruba every year.
I wonder when they make their reservations, November, December? Wouldn't
you think that ten
months before the trip would assure an award seat.

It was very disappointing since we've been saving our miles for two years
for a nice vacation in Aruba.
We're not business fliers.....just two oldtimers going on vacation.

I think it's time to cancel our AAdvantage account.

"Sufaud" wrote in message
...
New York Times
June 22, 2004
BUSINESS TRAVEL

For Frequent Fliers, Awards Seem Scarce
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT

When Timothy Placek tried to cash in his miles to fly his daughter
from St. Louis to Houston last year, Continental Airlines told him no
seats were available.

Disappointed, Mr. Placek, who is a Silver Elite member of
Continental's frequent-flier program, asked whether he could use his
points to travel to Omaha, to visit his parents in January, four
months later. No award seats were available on any of those flights,
either.

Well, then, how about applying the miles to a family vacation he was
planning to the Philippines, an increasingly frustrated Mr. Placek
asked. Unfortunately, the airline replied, that would not be possible;
all standard mileage-award seats on those flights were also taken.

As his annoyance increased, a phone representative told him all was
not lost. He could use his miles for any of those excursions if he
were willing to spend twice as many as the standard 25,000 miles for a
round trip within the United States, or 50,000 miles for overseas
destinations. Continental's EasyPass program, she said, would make it
possible.

"I was disappointed," said Mr. Placek, a vice president for MicroMed
Technologies, Inc., a manufacturer of medical devices in Houston. "I
felt as if they were trying to steal my miles." He reluctantly booked
the flight for his daughter, but not for the other two trips that he
had wanted.

His distress is shared by many business travelers. A survey by
e-Rewards Inc., a consulting firm in Dallas that specializes in
loyalty programs, suggests that many airlines are quietly cutting the
number of seats available at the 25,000-mile redemption level while
promoting their costlier premium-redemption plans.

In the poll of loyalty-program members, 26 percent described their
recent experiences in booking award travel as "much more difficult" or
"virtually impossible," an increase of five percentage points from an
identical survey last year. About two out of every five travelers
reported that they had made premium redemptions in the last 12 months,
and half of those who did said they had felt they had no other choice.

Continental says it has not reduced the number of conventional award
seats available to its frequent fliers. Julie King, an airline
spokeswoman, says redemption rates are up 15 percent this year, with
standard rewards accounting for 75 percent of the total. Ms. King said
the higher redemption levels were meant to "give our customers more
flexibility when seats are in high demand."

But the double-or-nothing proposition has left many frequent travelers
- and some loyalty program experts - with a different impression.

"This amounts to a covert increase in award levels,'' said Tim
Winship, who publishes FrequentFlier.com, a Web site.

Mr. Winship said the changes made sense from the airlines' point of
view. After all, most major carriers are losing money and have a
reservoir of unredeemed miles that some industry analysts say could
top 10 trillion this year. But, he said, they ought to be forthright
about what they are doing.

"There's no disclosure about what's going on behind the scenes, no
transparency to the system," he said. "Consumers don't know what their
odds are of getting an award seat. It's an outrage.'' Even when
travelers try to work within the system, they are often foiled.

"I have had nearly zero luck in getting the award travel I wanted at
the lower mileage amount," said Dana Baldwin, a management consultant
in Ada, Mich. "I've tried making reservations more than nine months in
advance, tried flexible dates, different airports, leaving from
different cities and arriving at different destinations, all with
little luck.''

Mr. Baldwin believes that airline-capacity controls are limiting the
number of 25,000-mile awards on every flight to a few seats. That way,
he speculates, airlines can say they have them available.

That is not so, according to at least one airline. "Customers on
frequent-flier award tickets are occupying more seats now than they
were five years ago," said Mary Stanik, a spokeswoman for Northwest
Airlines. Indeed, the portion of the carrier's revenue passenger miles
- an industry term for the total number of miles flown by paying
passengers - on award tickets rose to 7.5 percent last year from 6.1
percent in 1999.

Maybe both are right. Bruce Mainzer, a former director for the
yield-management department at United Airlines - the office in charge
of matching prices with demand - says basic economics are at work. It
is not that carriers are somehow trying to cheat frequent fliers out
of the miles they have earned, he says, it is just that they quite
naturally choose to give priority to paying customers.

"Award seats are made available after all the other revenue-producing
demand is met - in other words, only excess capacity is allocated to
award travel demand,'' Mr. Mainzer said. "But now there's less
capacity, because airlines are more closely matching seat demand to
capacity.''

Competition from low-cost carriers is driving the trend, he says.
These upstarts mostly serve popular tourist destinations like Las
Vegas and Orlando, Fla., and to stay in the game, the big airlines
have to squeeze as many pennies as they possibly can from each seat.

"They've pulled back even more seat capacity in the markets where
award travel demand is the strongest,'' Mr. Mainzer said, "which is
why travelers often find that an award seat is completely
unavailable."

If that is the case, then why would seats always seem to be available
for people willing to spend double the miles on them? For the simple
reason that airlines classify them as revenue producing and thus
allocate more of them per flight than they do ordinary award seats,
which they consider freebies.

They also assume that any premium tickets they allot for high-demand
routes will be snapped up, Mr. Mainzer says. But he wonders if they
are forgetting about the deep-rooted human dread of being fleeced.

"I think a majority of travelers think to themselves, 'I'm a loser if
I have to redeem that many miles for a ticket,' '' he said.

At the very least, they are irritated by the prospect of shelling out
more points. Richard Puk, the president of Intelligraphics Inc., a
computer-graphics consulting firm in Carlsbad, Calif., did not have
that many miles. Last month, he says, he tried unsuccessfully to
redeem his Delta award miles for two tickets from San Diego to Rapid
City, S.D. "I started trying to book the trip in March,'' Mr. Puk
said, "and was never able to find any available award seats."

Delta told him he could have the tickets if he anted up 80,000 miles,
but he had accumulated only 50,000, he says. Instead, he purchased the
tickets for $300 apiece.

He is still angry. "I was very frustrated," he said. "In the past,
I've never had any trouble getting a seat for my miles. It's almost as
if Delta had restricted the number of award seats to the point where
no one could get any.''

The e-Rewards study found that Mr. Puk is in good company. Almost 44
percent of frequent travelers reported difficulty in booking an award
seat more than once last year. It also concluded that some business
travelers are skeptical about the future of loyalty programs (see
chart). But the biggest surprise to Bill Russo, the executive vice
president at e-Rewards, was that business travelers remained fiercely
loyal to their programs despite their misgivings. "People are saying
it's virtually impossible to book seats,'' Mr. Russo said. "People are
afraid their programs won't have any value. Yet more than half of the
respondents told us they're satisfied enough with their primary
program that they would recommend it.''

What is going on? "These are businesspeople, and they understand the
business reasons behind what the airlines are doing,'' Mr. Russo said.
"Of course, when times get better, it's reasonable to think that
they'd expect the airlines to make reward redemption easier than it is
now.''


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/bu.../22redeem.html

In article ,
Sufaud wrote:
New York Times
June 22, 2004
BUSINESS TRAVEL

For Frequent Fliers, Awards Seem Scarce
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT

Is it any surprise, given the growth in accumulated airline miles
available in people's airline mile accounts? Wasn't it a few years
ago that the Economist magazine had an editorial suggesting that
inflation was likely in airline mile "currency", due to the ever
increasing amount of it ready to be used?

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy J. Lee
Unsolicited bulk or commercial email is not welcome.
No warranty of any kind is provided with this message.

If I sold script for $.02 per unit, then traded the script for items
of value, do I only consider the sale of the script to be revenue?

The airlines sell billions(trillions?) of miles to credit card
companies,, etc, which they consider revenue. The seat for miles
exchange is then considered a non-revenue transaction?

Is everyone collecting miles so they can get an airline logo mug?

Sufaud extrapolated from data available...



The e-Rewards study found that Mr. Puk is in good company. Almost 44
percent of frequent travelers reported difficulty in booking an award
seat more than once last year. It also concluded that some business
travelers are skeptical about the future of loyalty programs (see
chart). But the biggest surprise to Bill Russo, the executive vice
president at e-Rewards, was that business travelers remained fiercely
loyal to their programs despite their misgivings. "People are saying
it's virtually impossible to book seats,'' Mr. Russo said. "People are
afraid their programs won't have any value. Yet more than half of the
respondents told us they're satisfied enough with their primary
program that they would recommend it.''



Count me as leaning toward the other 56%....

Last August, we "purchased" Delta Sky Miles Rewards - the lower 'priced"
version - for two Business Elite tickets (inc. FC domestic legs) from DFW
to Milan and return on 2NOV, 3 months lead time, while two weeks ago, my
daughter reserved AA awards tickets (at the "cheap" tariff) for her sister
to fly from BUR to ACT (an odd route via LSV) departing on 1JUL, close to
the "Fourth". It may have more to do with days of the week, routes and
destinations than number of seats available.

TMO

In article ,
Sufaud wrote:

New York Times
June 22, 2004
BUSINESS TRAVEL

For Frequent Fliers, Awards Seem Scarce
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT


I don't believe any news posting of the past year raised my blood
pressure more than this one, particularly considering my own personal
experiences over the past several years in attempting to actually
_obtain_ any of the travel awards so enticingly promised in the glossy
brochures United Airlines continues to put out for its mileage plan.

In my view their expanding policy (and presumably the policy of many
other airlines as well) is simply to renege on delivering these awards
by making award seats essentially unavailable -- and this amounts to
consumer fraud, pure and simple.

I can only look forward to the class action suit that I hope will
eventually ensue; I'll eagerly join in it. Heck, if I won the lottery,
I'd probably spend the money to fund it.

what these airline companies don't realize is that we remember which
programs work best.

I recently started picking American flights over Continental just
because I was unable to book award travel with Continental for a
recent trip to hawaii. With American I was able to book with 3 months
advance.

I've also starting picking Frontier over United because with Frontier
I earn a round-trip ticket with less miles. Not sure about
availability with them though.

Just make it simple for us and we'll come in droves!

Imagine, if someone announced "ok, we're going to cut your miles in
half, but from now on, if there are seats, then you can book them with
your miles"? I'd **** myself, that's what I'd do.

chris

(Sufaud) wrote in message m...
New York Times
June 22, 2004
BUSINESS TRAVEL

For Frequent Fliers, Awards Seem Scarce
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT

When Timothy Placek tried to cash in his miles to fly his daughter
from St. Louis to Houston last year, Continental Airlines told him no
seats were available.

Disappointed, Mr. Placek, who is a Silver Elite member of
Continental's frequent-flier program, asked whether he could use his
points to travel to Omaha, to visit his parents in January, four
months later. No award seats were available on any of those flights,
either.

Well, then, how about applying the miles to a family vacation he was
planning to the Philippines, an increasingly frustrated Mr. Placek
asked. Unfortunately, the airline replied, that would not be possible;
all standard mileage-award seats on those flights were also taken.

As his annoyance increased, a phone representative told him all was
not lost. He could use his miles for any of those excursions if he
were willing to spend twice as many as the standard 25,000 miles for a
round trip within the United States, or 50,000 miles for overseas
destinations. Continental's EasyPass program, she said, would make it
possible.

"I was disappointed," said Mr. Placek, a vice president for MicroMed
Technologies, Inc., a manufacturer of medical devices in Houston. "I
felt as if they were trying to steal my miles." He reluctantly booked
the flight for his daughter, but not for the other two trips that he
had wanted.

His distress is shared by many business travelers. A survey by
e-Rewards Inc., a consulting firm in Dallas that specializes in
loyalty programs, suggests that many airlines are quietly cutting the
number of seats available at the 25,000-mile redemption level while
promoting their costlier premium-redemption plans.

In the poll of loyalty-program members, 26 percent described their
recent experiences in booking award travel as "much more difficult" or
"virtually impossible," an increase of five percentage points from an
identical survey last year. About two out of every five travelers
reported that they had made premium redemptions in the last 12 months,
and half of those who did said they had felt they had no other choice.

Continental says it has not reduced the number of conventional award
seats available to its frequent fliers. Julie King, an airline
spokeswoman, says redemption rates are up 15 percent this year, with
standard rewards accounting for 75 percent of the total. Ms. King said
the higher redemption levels were meant to "give our customers more
flexibility when seats are in high demand."

But the double-or-nothing proposition has left many frequent travelers
- and some loyalty program experts - with a different impression.

"This amounts to a covert increase in award levels,'' said Tim
Winship, who publishes FrequentFlier.com, a Web site.

Mr. Winship said the changes made sense from the airlines' point of
view. After all, most major carriers are losing money and have a
reservoir of unredeemed miles that some industry analysts say could
top 10 trillion this year. But, he said, they ought to be forthright
about what they are doing.

"There's no disclosure about what's going on behind the scenes, no
transparency to the system," he said. "Consumers don't know what their
odds are of getting an award seat. It's an outrage.'' Even when
travelers try to work within the system, they are often foiled.

"I have had nearly zero luck in getting the award travel I wanted at
the lower mileage amount," said Dana Baldwin, a management consultant
in Ada, Mich. "I've tried making reservations more than nine months in
advance, tried flexible dates, different airports, leaving from
different cities and arriving at different destinations, all with
little luck.''

Mr. Baldwin believes that airline-capacity controls are limiting the
number of 25,000-mile awards on every flight to a few seats. That way,
he speculates, airlines can say they have them available.

That is not so, according to at least one airline. "Customers on
frequent-flier award tickets are occupying more seats now than they
were five years ago," said Mary Stanik, a spokeswoman for Northwest
Airlines. Indeed, the portion of the carrier's revenue passenger miles
- an industry term for the total number of miles flown by paying
passengers - on award tickets rose to 7.5 percent last year from 6.1
percent in 1999.

Maybe both are right. Bruce Mainzer, a former director for the
yield-management department at United Airlines - the office in charge
of matching prices with demand - says basic economics are at work. It
is not that carriers are somehow trying to cheat frequent fliers out
of the miles they have earned, he says, it is just that they quite
naturally choose to give priority to paying customers.

"Award seats are made available after all the other revenue-producing
demand is met - in other words, only excess capacity is allocated to
award travel demand,'' Mr. Mainzer said. "But now there's less
capacity, because airlines are more closely matching seat demand to
capacity.''

Competition from low-cost carriers is driving the trend, he says.
These upstarts mostly serve popular tourist destinations like Las
Vegas and Orlando, Fla., and to stay in the game, the big airlines
have to squeeze as many pennies as they possibly can from each seat.

"They've pulled back even more seat capacity in the markets where
award travel demand is the strongest,'' Mr. Mainzer said, "which is
why travelers often find that an award seat is completely
unavailable."

If that is the case, then why would seats always seem to be available
for people willing to spend double the miles on them? For the simple
reason that airlines classify them as revenue producing and thus
allocate more of them per flight than they do ordinary award seats,
which they consider freebies.

They also assume that any premium tickets they allot for high-demand
routes will be snapped up, Mr. Mainzer says. But he wonders if they
are forgetting about the deep-rooted human dread of being fleeced.

"I think a majority of travelers think to themselves, 'I'm a loser if
I have to redeem that many miles for a ticket,' '' he said.

At the very least, they are irritated by the prospect of shelling out
more points. Richard Puk, the president of Intelligraphics Inc., a
computer-graphics consulting firm in Carlsbad, Calif., did not have
that many miles. Last month, he says, he tried unsuccessfully to
redeem his Delta award miles for two tickets from San Diego to Rapid
City, S.D. "I started trying to book the trip in March,'' Mr. Puk
said, "and was never able to find any available award seats."

Delta told him he could have the tickets if he anted up 80,000 miles,
but he had accumulated only 50,000, he says. Instead, he purchased the
tickets for $300 apiece.

He is still angry. "I was very frustrated," he said. "In the past,
I've never had any trouble getting a seat for my miles. It's almost as
if Delta had restricted the number of award seats to the point where
no one could get any.''

The e-Rewards study found that Mr. Puk is in good company. Almost 44
percent of frequent travelers reported difficulty in booking an award
seat more than once last year. It also concluded that some business
travelers are skeptical about the future of loyalty programs (see
chart). But the biggest surprise to Bill Russo, the executive vice
president at e-Rewards, was that business travelers remained fiercely
loyal to their programs despite their misgivings. "People are saying
it's virtually impossible to book seats,'' Mr. Russo said. "People are
afraid their programs won't have any value. Yet more than half of the
respondents told us they're satisfied enough with their primary
program that they would recommend it.''

What is going on? "These are businesspeople, and they understand the
business reasons behind what the airlines are doing,'' Mr. Russo said.
"Of course, when times get better, it's reasonable to think that
they'd expect the airlines to make reward redemption easier than it is
now.''


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/bu.../22redeem.html

In article ,
chris wrote:
Imagine, if someone announced "ok, we're going to cut your miles in
half, but from now on, if there are seats, then you can book them with
your miles"?

Doesn't Southwest have a reputation of generous award seat availability,
perhaps due to its quick expiration of frequent flyer credits which
limits the "inflation" of its frequent flyer credit "currency"?

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy J. Lee
Unsolicited bulk or commercial email is not welcome.
No warranty of any kind is provided with this message.

Excellent article and long overdue. Perhaps the story now has "leg" and
changes will be made. Award availability at "regular price" is shown he
http://www.webflyer.com/programs/award_upgrade_index/ based upon the replies
of visitors.

Frequent flyer seats need to be fully disclosed via the following
requirements:
Airlines with capacity controls on frequent flyer seats must list the number
of seats flown between each city pair every month. They must also disclose
the number of seats used by frequent flyer members paying "regular" price at
the end of each month.
Airlines must allow distribution of frequent flyer seats via the same web
sites (i.e. Expedia, Oribtz, Travelocity, etc.) that distribute their
regular tickets.

The first two items will tell the public what the chances are in general
terms.
The last item will allow travelers to set up an Orbitz DealDetector to watch
for seats to become available.

The result will be a fully informed public that can then determine whether
loyalty to a specific airline has value. Airline seats are a commodity and
prices vary thousands of times per day. There is no way to predict future
availability but history is an excellent teacher.

Further discussions are viewed at www.FlyerTalk.com and www.WebFlyer.com.

More than two years ago, I published a study about frequent flyer seat
availability on Northwest Airlines once they announced the elimination of
holiday black-out dates:
http://home.netcom.com/~rcowen/frequent_flyer_seats.htm. It's a shame that
none of the media followed up on the story although they praised the
airlines for eliminating the restrictions when it was announced.

As much as I dislike government regulations, perhaps it's time to have the
FTC and/or the Congressional Aviation sub-committee address this issue?

Bob Cowen
The Internet Travel Guru (TM)
www.InternetTravelTips.com




"Sufaud" wrote in message
...
New York Times
June 22, 2004
BUSINESS TRAVEL

For Frequent Fliers, Awards Seem Scarce
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT

When Timothy Placek tried to cash in his miles to fly his daughter
from St. Louis to Houston last year, Continental Airlines told him no
seats were available.

Disappointed, Mr. Placek, who is a Silver Elite member of
Continental's frequent-flier program, asked whether he could use his
points to travel to Omaha, to visit his parents in January, four
months later. No award seats were available on any of those flights,
either.

Well, then, how about applying the miles to a family vacation he was
planning to the Philippines, an increasingly frustrated Mr. Placek
asked. Unfortunately, the airline replied, that would not be possible;
all standard mileage-award seats on those flights were also taken.

As his annoyance increased, a phone representative told him all was
not lost. He could use his miles for any of those excursions if he
were willing to spend twice as many as the standard 25,000 miles for a
round trip within the United States, or 50,000 miles for overseas
destinations. Continental's EasyPass program, she said, would make it
possible.

"I was disappointed," said Mr. Placek, a vice president for MicroMed
Technologies, Inc., a manufacturer of medical devices in Houston. "I
felt as if they were trying to steal my miles." He reluctantly booked
the flight for his daughter, but not for the other two trips that he
had wanted.

His distress is shared by many business travelers. A survey by
e-Rewards Inc., a consulting firm in Dallas that specializes in
loyalty programs, suggests that many airlines are quietly cutting the
number of seats available at the 25,000-mile redemption level while
promoting their costlier premium-redemption plans.

In the poll of loyalty-program members, 26 percent described their
recent experiences in booking award travel as "much more difficult" or
"virtually impossible," an increase of five percentage points from an
identical survey last year. About two out of every five travelers
reported that they had made premium redemptions in the last 12 months,
and half of those who did said they had felt they had no other choice.

Continental says it has not reduced the number of conventional award
seats available to its frequent fliers. Julie King, an airline
spokeswoman, says redemption rates are up 15 percent this year, with
standard rewards accounting for 75 percent of the total. Ms. King said
the higher redemption levels were meant to "give our customers more
flexibility when seats are in high demand."

But the double-or-nothing proposition has left many frequent travelers
- and some loyalty program experts - with a different impression.

"This amounts to a covert increase in award levels,'' said Tim
Winship, who publishes FrequentFlier.com, a Web site.

Mr. Winship said the changes made sense from the airlines' point of
view. After all, most major carriers are losing money and have a
reservoir of unredeemed miles that some industry analysts say could
top 10 trillion this year. But, he said, they ought to be forthright
about what they are doing.

"There's no disclosure about what's going on behind the scenes, no
transparency to the system," he said. "Consumers don't know what their
odds are of getting an award seat. It's an outrage.'' Even when
travelers try to work within the system, they are often foiled.

"I have had nearly zero luck in getting the award travel I wanted at
the lower mileage amount," said Dana Baldwin, a management consultant
in Ada, Mich. "I've tried making reservations more than nine months in
advance, tried flexible dates, different airports, leaving from
different cities and arriving at different destinations, all with
little luck.''

Mr. Baldwin believes that airline-capacity controls are limiting the
number of 25,000-mile awards on every flight to a few seats. That way,
he speculates, airlines can say they have them available.

That is not so, according to at least one airline. "Customers on
frequent-flier award tickets are occupying more seats now than they
were five years ago," said Mary Stanik, a spokeswoman for Northwest
Airlines. Indeed, the portion of the carrier's revenue passenger miles
- an industry term for the total number of miles flown by paying
passengers - on award tickets rose to 7.5 percent last year from 6.1
percent in 1999.

Maybe both are right. Bruce Mainzer, a former director for the
yield-management department at United Airlines - the office in charge
of matching prices with demand - says basic economics are at work. It
is not that carriers are somehow trying to cheat frequent fliers out
of the miles they have earned, he says, it is just that they quite
naturally choose to give priority to paying customers.

"Award seats are made available after all the other revenue-producing
demand is met - in other words, only excess capacity is allocated to
award travel demand,'' Mr. Mainzer said. "But now there's less
capacity, because airlines are more closely matching seat demand to
capacity.''

Competition from low-cost carriers is driving the trend, he says.
These upstarts mostly serve popular tourist destinations like Las
Vegas and Orlando, Fla., and to stay in the game, the big airlines
have to squeeze as many pennies as they possibly can from each seat.

"They've pulled back even more seat capacity in the markets where
award travel demand is the strongest,'' Mr. Mainzer said, "which is
why travelers often find that an award seat is completely
unavailable."

If that is the case, then why would seats always seem to be available
for people willing to spend double the miles on them? For the simple
reason that airlines classify them as revenue producing and thus
allocate more of them per flight than they do ordinary award seats,
which they consider freebies.

They also assume that any premium tickets they allot for high-demand
routes will be snapped up, Mr. Mainzer says. But he wonders if they
are forgetting about the deep-rooted human dread of being fleeced.

"I think a majority of travelers think to themselves, 'I'm a loser if
I have to redeem that many miles for a ticket,' '' he said.

At the very least, they are irritated by the prospect of shelling out
more points. Richard Puk, the president of Intelligraphics Inc., a
computer-graphics consulting firm in Carlsbad, Calif., did not have
that many miles. Last month, he says, he tried unsuccessfully to
redeem his Delta award miles for two tickets from San Diego to Rapid
City, S.D. "I started trying to book the trip in March,'' Mr. Puk
said, "and was never able to find any available award seats."

Delta told him he could have the tickets if he anted up 80,000 miles,
but he had accumulated only 50,000, he says. Instead, he purchased the
tickets for $300 apiece.

He is still angry. "I was very frustrated," he said. "In the past,
I've never had any trouble getting a seat for my miles. It's almost as
if Delta had restricted the number of award seats to the point where
no one could get any.''

The e-Rewards study found that Mr. Puk is in good company. Almost 44
percent of frequent travelers reported difficulty in booking an award
seat more than once last year. It also concluded that some business
travelers are skeptical about the future of loyalty programs (see
chart). But the biggest surprise to Bill Russo, the executive vice
president at e-Rewards, was that business travelers remained fiercely
loyal to their programs despite their misgivings. "People are saying
it's virtually impossible to book seats,'' Mr. Russo said. "People are
afraid their programs won't have any value. Yet more than half of the
respondents told us they're satisfied enough with their primary
program that they would recommend it.''

What is going on? "These are businesspeople, and they understand the
business reasons behind what the airlines are doing,'' Mr. Russo said.
"Of course, when times get better, it's reasonable to think that
they'd expect the airlines to make reward redemption easier than it is
now.''


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/bu.../22redeem.html

(Timothy J. Lee) wrote:

Doesn't Southwest have a reputation of generous award seat availability,
perhaps due to its quick expiration of frequent flyer credits which
limits the "inflation" of its frequent flyer credit "currency"?

If Southwest goes where you want to go (domestic only), they clearly have the
best program. If a seat is available, you can have it, subject to just a couple
of blackout days each year. tickets are good for up to 12 months after being
earned.