British Airways Executive Club is a challenging program already: Fuel surcharges; extremely expensive premium cabin long haul awards; fuel surcharges; few elite benefits that aren’t provided to all oneworld elites of the same tier; fuel surcharges; modest mileage-earning since they eliminated 1 mile per mile flown.
And now we can expect things to get worse. Air France KLM is introducing dynamic pricing for awards June 1.
Ultime Llamada points out that in an investor presentation British Airways noted plans to do the same thing next year.
That said Head for Points suggests dynamic pricing might only apply to “last minute bookings” or the introduction of additional inventory or last seat availability based on ticket price (which BA doesn’t offer to most members today).
IAG parent British Airways was supposed to combine all Avios programs onto a single platform in 2017 but that’s been pushed to “by June 2018.” And in 2018 we’ll get ‘dynamic’ pricing of awards.
They’ll frame this for customers as somehow being a benefit — some awards will be more expensive and some will be less expensive. But the awards that will go up in price are the ones that were a good value, that you’d actually want to redeem for. And the ones that go down in price won’t suddenly become a good value.
IAG CEO Willie Walsh told us already — in an earlier investor presentation — why they do things.
Continue reading British Airways Moving to Revenue-Based Redemptions Next Year…