The Freddie Awards are in their 25th year of representing the voice of the frequent traveler, honoring the best in airline, hotel, and credit card loyalty programs during the previous year.
Today is your last chance to vote for your favorite programs, the ones you believe did the best job for their members in 2012.
Last month I predicted that you would be among more than 1,000,000 frequent flyers expressing their collective voice.
In fact – and I don’t have final numbers yet — it appears that nearly three million people have participated so far.
I’ve had the great honor of serving as Chair of Nominations for the Freddies, so I’ve been in touch with leadership at scores of frequent flyer programs over the past couple of months preparing for this.
And as a co-founder of the Milepoint.com frequen flyer community, I’m proud that Milepoint is one of the sponsors. (Airline and hotel frequent flyer programs do not pay any fee to enter, and are not charged to attend the dinner either, since decisions are all in the hands of frequent travelers.)
The major frequent flyer and frequent guest programs all attend, are trumpted their successes. The great thing about that is that there’s genuine excitement about a win, I’ve been told by program heads that at the margin the feedback they get from customers through the awards often influences their decisions about program features to keep or promotions to continue. It’s real positive feedback that helps sustain the best parts of programs, and helps reinforce the good decisions winning programs make.
So it’s worth making your voice heard — cast your ballot before voting closes at midnight in the last inhabited time zone tonight and come share who you voted for at Milepoint.
I’ve been asked to vote, and so I shall.
I’m not convinced the Freddies’ voting methods are an accurate representation.
For example, I’m not even familiar with the promotions that are listed with my two primary airlines, so it’s ridiculously hard to rank them against other promotions from other airlines. I was tempted to just put my two preferred airlines as my only two selections, but that hardly seems accurate.
For something like redemption ability, I know (from personal experience) that UA is great and AS is decent, but while I hear that DL sucks, I have no personal experience with it. So of course I’ll rate UA better than AS and put DL at the bottom, but those rankings are not all from my personal experience, and I have no idea how DL compares, for example, to AeroMexico or WestJet.
A better method would be to allow people to rate their satisfaction with each featured promotion or program. That way, I could rank UA’s award availability an 8, AS availability a 6, and then someone else familiar with DL’s award availability can rate their satisfaction with it (honestly a 2 if comments around the Internet are to be believed, or maybe they deserve a 5–I wouldn’t know), and the highest average score wins.
I went through the voting this year and am so unfamiliar with most things that I’ll likely skip out on voting this year.
(I used to always vote AS tops for everything because I, like thousands of other AS elites, were vocal AS evangelists, but the cuts they’ve made over the last few years have brought a dose of reality into AS elites’ perspectives, so I doubt you’ll be seeing AS win as much as they used to, where they won just because so many people loved them and wanted to see them do well, not because they were actually superior to others–again, a flaw in the voting system.)
we should never vote until these greedy companies stop devaluing