Airlines improving but frequent fliers still get the “shaftâ€
The Obama Administration is admittedly trying to ensure airline passengers receive higher compensation for being bumped and other consumer benefits but one category of flyer is still “getting the shaft this summer,” says TIME Magazine.
That is the estimated 120 million US travelers who are members of airline frequent flyer programs.
“Flyers who want to redeem their miles for free trips are finding it increasingly hard, and in some cases next to impossible, to do so — at least on the days they want to fly and for the typical award level (usually 25,000 miles) needed to earn a free domestic flight,”” the magazine says.
Frequent flyer tickets are never quite free. But in recent years, added fees and restrictions have become much more commonplace.
Other perks of frequent flyer travel – such as the ability to make a stop on one leg of a round trip (once allowed by American, but no more) and the ability to change flight times without a fee – have steadily been taken away by most airlines,” the magazine says.
But the biggest problem for frequent flyers is simply being able to use those reward miles.
Unless passengers book months, or even a year, in advance, seats on the most traveled routes and times are almost never available. The airlines typically set aside a few frequent flyer seats on each flight (the airlines won’t say how many, pointing out that it varies according to capacity).
A study published in May by IdeaWorks, a consulting firm, showed that, for travel dates from June through October 2010, award seats aboard Continental were available 71.4% of the time, followed by United (68.6%), American (57.9%) and Delta (12.9%). Yet those figures seem to understate the problem – especially this summer, when airlines have cut back the number of flights in response to the recession while traffic ratchets back up, leaving frequent flyers out in the cold.
TIME sought to make frequent flyer reservations for a round-trip from New York City to Los Angeles, one of the nation’s most heavily traveled routes with a half-dozen airlines offering nonstop flights, for any date in July or August.
On American Airlines, not a single 25,000-mile-award round trip was available for the month of July. A few outbound seats were available in late August, but only a single return: Aug. 31.
Delta Airlines, too, had not a single frequent flyer round trip available in July; for August, just one outbound flight was available, but no return. Continental was only slightly better: no round trips available in July but a few in August, while United could get the passenger out on one flight in July and had a few round trips left in August.
“It’s not that people can’t use their awards. It’s just that they won’t want to pay the price of getting that award,” said Randy Petersen, publisher of InsideFlyer Magazine. He calls it a “little bit of smoke and mirrors.”
By David Wilkening
David
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