Airline Loyalty

In recent times, Qantas is probably the best known airline to publish flights on which all seats can only be purchased using miles or points (rather than cash), but in April this year, British Airways joined in the fun when it announced 'Avios only' flights to/from Sharm El Sheikh and Geneva.

As JetBlue has a partnership with American Airlines, most people who fly with the airline probably credit their flights to either JetBlue's TrueBlue program or to the American Airlines AAdvantage program. For JetBlue's transatlantic flights, however, the AAdvantage program isn't an option and that's where another of the airline's partnerships can suddenly become useful.

The fact that most large hotel chains offer some sort of guarantee that the price a customer will pay when they book directly through them is the lowest price available is pretty well known. What appears to be less well known is that a number of airlines offer a similar policy and earlier, I finally had a chance to see how well (or badly!) BA's best price guarantee policy can work.

Virgin Atlantic's has brought back the best points sale that we've ever seen it run and that means that for the next few weeks, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club members can buy points from 0.89 pence each (UK accounts) or from 1.48 cents each (US accounts).

Qatar Airways has launched a new promotion in which it's offering members of its Privilege Club (free to join) up to 20% off fares between various European countries and the airline's destinations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania.

I'm going to have to hold my hands up and admit that I had no idea that United Airlines had a program that allows MileagePlus members to subscribe to a monthly purchase of miles. Now, however, I'm all caught up, as United has been emailing the various accounts that I control to see if anyone behind them is uninformed enough to think that what's on offer is anything but terrible value for money.

British Airways is running another Avios sale and as we have seen in the past, it's offering a bonus of up to 50% on Avios purchases as long as they're completed by the end of the day on 19 December 2022.

It's the middle of the month and that means that Singapore Airlines has published its latest set of KrisFlyer Spontaneous Escapes deals and while this set is marginally better than the rubbish that was offered last month, we're still not seeing the kind of deals that we saw pre pandemic and in the first set of spontaneous escapes following the lifting of pandemic restrictions.

The AAdvantage program's current incarnation is still very new (it only came into being earlier this year) but American Airlines is already pushing through new changes which, on the whole, are probably going to be unpopular.

Miles & Smiles is the loyalty program of Turkish Airlines and as another year draws to a close, it has brought back a very popular promotion that, if I'm remembering correctly, it ran around the same time in 2021.