Also: does anyone see these programs and think wow, this airline UX is so awful I want to show them my loyalty so that eventually they'll stop trying so hard to make me unhappy?
I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another, where this decision costs the shareholders a little bit but only the employee who's traveling will notice. Then it makes perfect sense: the employee directs a little extra money from the treasury to the airline, the airline provides a kickback to the employee in the form of a little comfort or attention, and that explains the whole miles phenomenon.
Yup! The dead giveaway - airline miles follow the passenger, not the purchaser.
My mom used to travel constantly for a Sales Engineer job, and in her telling the opportunity to arrange your air travel for optimal frequent flyer miles was an acknowledged piece of compensation for the hellish travel schedule.
>I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another,
I suppose it depends on the business but at my Fortune 50 we're required to use "lowest logical airfare". You can force a choice of Southwest over United by choosing one airport over another, and there's enough wiggle room to let you fly at your preferred times but overall it's designed to prevent gaming and escalates things for review if you try.
But unless you're a highly placed executive no one travels on the company dime often enough to bother with air miles anyway; airlines require far too much travel for even the bottom-most loyalty tier.
> But unless you're a highly placed executive no one travels on the company dime often enough to bother with air miles anyway
This isn't really a true statement. Marketing and enterprise sales folks travel a lot on the company dime. I'm on the engineering and consulting staff in my company, and I travel a decent amount, mostly domestic. Most of our engineers do frequent on-sites. One might not be able to get status, but the air miles definitely add up. I've been able to get more than a few free flights and upgrades. I would say it's worth bothering about.
> Marketing and enterprise sales folks travel a lot on the company dime
Yes, my bad. I just meant at my employer; we've invested heavily in telepresence, so only the bigwigs here get to travel with any regularity. And I was really trying to say without regular travel you won't end up with a meaningful status. For example United has a raft of tiers so unless you're [1] 1K or Global Services [2] you're literally not at the front of the queue for anything. Even their "Group 1" / "Group 2" boarding system meant to speed things up has a giant asterisk that reads "except 1K/GS, they go before anyone else."
[1] I'm using the colloquial "you" here to really mean "one" which sounds very stiff and formal to me. I don't literally mean you.
Not necessarily. Two round trip in economy to Asia in a year will get you bottom tier status. Quarterly trips in business (not uncommon if you work at some big company) would get you top-tier status.
Two RT trips to Asia might barely meet the minimum tier for miles, but most (all?) airlines now have a minimum in dollars spent, as well. For example, for the first status level, United requires 25,000 miles and $3000 spent with United (this means code-share partner airline flights don't count).
One year, I flew RT SFO-Singapore (16,000 miles RT) and SFO-Tel-Aviv (10,200 miles RT). Due to getting a really good deal on economy tickets, those two tickets were less than $3,000 total and thus I didn't get even the most basic status level.
Not all airlines have spend requirements. (Alaska doesn't, and neither do most foreign programs). You can waive United spend requirement by using their credit card, too. Also, Star Alliance partner flights do earn PQDs on United as long as you fly on a United ticket (# starting in 016).
I have quite a few friends who fly primarily United but credit flights to other partner airlines where the requirements aren't as high. Aegean used to be a very popular way to easily get Star Alliance Gold status, and you were able to earn it purely by flying United.
Yes, you're right on Alaska, although since they don't fly internationally, it's much harder to rack up the miles with 2 trips (as parent was suggesting). Incidentally, Alaska is my favorite carrier for many reasons, but only for domestic flights.
As for spending with the credit card, unfortunately that isn't an option for me since my company pays for many of my tickets. And they will purchase the cheapest ticket, which often means buying it on the partner airline (e.g. Lufthansa plane but cheaper if booked as an Air Canada).
Thanks for the tip on Aegean. I checked it out and looks like 24,000 miles on partner airlines without any other restrictions to get Star Alliance Silver! Looks like a winner!
Status programs are really in a sad state on airlines. They are supposed to be a reward to customers but many times end up feeling punitive. For the airlines like United that have the minimum dollars spent requirement, I wish they would just make that the sole criterion, which would at least simply things!
2 Asia trips won't even meet the minimum number of flights, let alone qualify you for any status.
4 trips on Star Alliance from the US to Asia might get you the lowest status, which does essentially nothing for you. You probably would need another 8 trips to make it to Gold which is where it actually means something.
Your math is way off. Did you check the distance on a map? SFO-HKG 2x will earn you 27k miles [1].
Most programs have their status levels at 25k miles for lowest and 100k for highest. So, ignoring spend, 2 round-trips to HKG will earn you Silver status on United.
4 trips in business class (double miles) will earn you 110k miles, enough for 1K status.
What? There’s a whole cottage industry of helping business travelers accumulate miles and award tiers. And the vast majority of heavy business travelers are just rank and file employees. It’s definitely not only highly placed executives.
I'm just talking about where I work; we've heavily invested in telepresence, to the point most everyone has a desk phone with a camera, a camera attached to their pc or both plus dedicated telepresence rooms integrated into outlook's meeting calendar. Almost every conference call is now video with the exception of really large calls like incident management.
I had 3 trips from North America to South America in the space of a year for recruiting, hiring and training and it nudged me into United's bottom tier, Silver. One more trip might have pushed me into Gold. Considering there's three tiers above that when you include 1K and Global Services and you can see other than possibly boarding in Group 2 there's not much point in the frequent flyer program. I requested upgrade on a flight from SFO to IAH recently just to see what would happen. I was something like number 58 on a 70+ person list. Again - all just anecdata.
Could someone jumpstart the process by getting some status tier via credit card? No doubt. Can they push it further using mileage runs? Of course! There's a flyertalk forum dedicated to it. But airlines are on to those shenanigans and the days of mileage running yourself into top tier status without a great deal of effort including getting one's employer to book flights that aren't the bottom-most fare classes as those yield the least in rewards. In fact there is at least one fare class (N) that gives no mileage or points at all.
> But unless you're a highly placed executive no one travels on the company dime often enough to bother with air miles anyway; airlines require far too much travel for even the bottom-most loyalty tier.
I was able to book myself a free business class trip to Europe on miles from flying just a couple of times a year, coach, non-flex fares, on the company dime, as a working schlub.
I know plenty of folks who fly business class to China half a dozen or a dozen times a year and have more upgrades than they could ever possibly use. Hardly executives.
You get the same thing from parts suppliers. I regularly get emails announcing "spend $2000 with us in the next month and receive a FREE GIFT (rc helicopter / iPad / swanky wallet / DVD player / other nice thing)". It seems pretty blatant bribery to get employees (who probably don't care much either way where their gear comes from) to buy from one supplier over another.
That seems like an incredibly petty policy to me. You can't chose the direct flight that's $20 more expensive over the 2 layover flight at the bottom of the price list that tacks an additional 6 hours on the trip? Your charged hours would totally destroy that savings.
Frequent business travel kind of sucks. A lot of employers are willing to look the other way as long as it keeps their people happy. Especially in fields like sales with high turnover.
I'm pretty convinced this all boils down to a sort of low-grade white collar corruption: people who travel a lot for business sometimes can get away with favoring one airline over another, where this decision costs the shareholders a little bit but only the employee who's traveling will notice. Then it makes perfect sense: the employee directs a little extra money from the treasury to the airline, the airline provides a kickback to the employee in the form of a little comfort or attention, and that explains the whole miles phenomenon.