Emirates Makes A Smart Play: Lowering Award Prices To Win Customers [Roundup]

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • Emirates Skywards has 5 million active members out of a marketing database of 35 million. One in eight tickets on Emirates involve mileage-redemption (reward, upgrade, cash and miles). Strategy behind reducing economy redemption prices is to engage members with a redemption sooner, so that they stick with the program.

    Air France KLM, by contrast, actually reduced business class award prices to drive more business to its loyalty program. That seems to be working.

  • I do not think Spirit Airlines was going to fire staff because passengers arrived late to the gate and missed their flight.

  • Earn 15,000 Millennium Hotels points on a single stay, which can be worth more than the cost of the room

  • The mistake everyone makes at revolving sushi restaurants is forgetting what they’ve ordered.

  • How to roll through life:

    I guess this guy will still be okay even if he doesn’t get the upgrade
    byu/cwajgapls inunitedairlines

  • Hyatt co-brand cardmembers now earn for Mr and Mrs Smith spend as though it was Hyatt spend.

  • Should a kid be in a car seat on a plane?

    [R]eview[ing] all in-flight medical events from January 2009 to January 2014 that were reported to an airline medical event center. This center covers about 35% of commercial flights, so about 1 billion person-flights per year, or 5 billion over the time period of the study. Based on FAA estimates, we’d expect about 2% of these to be children under 4 — so, about 100 million flights.

    In this 100 million child flights, there were 400 in-flight injuries, of which about 40% were burns (from the food service, presumably), and others were falls, object trauma, etc. This is an overall rate of 1 in 250,000. This number is very small. If you flew once every day, it would take 684 years to expect one incident.

    That’s injuries. There is also the question of what happens in a crash. This is even harder to answer, because most airplane crashes are not survivable. But a complicated JAMA Pediatrics paper went through a series of calculations, under varying assumptions, and suggested that 0.4 child deaths per year might be prevented by requiring all lap infants to have a seat purchased for them and use a car seat (this paper did not consider older children).

    The JAMA paper makes an additional very important point. The AAP guidelines would require families to purchase additional tickets for lap infants. For some families, perhaps on the margin between flying and driving, this could cause them to switch to a car. Cars are much more dangerous than airplanes. The paper suggests that if 5% to 10% of families switched to driving, then we would expect more total deaths as a result of the policy.

  • The idea is great, but the execution seems poor:

    MCO United Club
    byu/blackh8552 inunitedairlines

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. “Axe someone” means ask someone. Many people pronounce ask as “axe” in much of the urban areas of the United States.

  2. Back when The Onion had some shock value, one of their craziest headlines was “African-American Neighborhood Terrorized by Ask Murderer”

  3. I’ve only eaten revolving sushi restaurant sushi in Japan at Haneda Airport. I have had it several times in the USA. In Haneda Airport, I was there when the restaurant opened so there weren’t more than a few customers. That was an advantage since I was served all of the sushi I ordered by a single sushi chef. None came on the conveyor. I let the sushi chef decide on the condiments such as wasabi (which I love since I grew up with homemade horse radish). It was a great experience and the sushi was perfect. Not cheap but also not too expensive.

  4. @Mon, lol, Gary is struggling with English today. Clearly the customer is asking for the boarding agent to ask someone. But, more clicks if you choose to misunderstand.

  5. This is what happens when you speak broken English he does have a good command of the F bomb so he must have gone to Harvard or Brown

    FYI the twitter user coded it as axe

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