News and notes from around the interweb:
- The former head of the Malaysia Airlines Enrich frequent flyer program, Mark Ross-Smith, explains why wallet share (percentage of a customer’s business) is more important than total spend — and how a frequent flyer program can use commercially-available data to determine how much business they’re losing.
- Priority Pass-accessible The Club lounge will open in Buffalo in August
- Air Italy’s COO says their US routes are performing well and will have over 90% load factors this summer (which is different than being profitable, and may be hopeful). Still odd of them to announce US routes and then cancel them before even putting them on sale.
- US government has a worse reputation than Spirit Airlines, Wells Fargo
Copyright: boarding1now / 123RF Stock Photo - Jet Airways missing March 19 interest payments, grounding 4 more planes over lease defaults
- Livecam of DC’s National Airport
Wells Fargo is a company whose credibility and reputation stays in question.
Thanks for the DCA link.
Nice reminder to set your Bank and Credit Card Privacy preferences to not allow sharing of creditworthiness and other data. Or use a bank that doesn’t share the data Also disable location-based services on your Apps, Browser etc.
The first link is very interesting and certainly prompts some interesting discussion. However the suggested methodology in Steps 1&2 are is overly simplistic and extremely flawed. I often visit airline sites to compare cash and award fares. The fact that I rarely buy a ticket is not an indication of loyalty but perhaps of competitively deficient product or fares. Similarly there is no credit card that would fully capture all of my airline spend – most goes to an unaffiliated card or a corporate cards. And if my card issuer, telco and 3rd party data are being shared with an airline, there are going to be some lawsuits filed soon.
I would argue that the best source of data would be existing customers. But airline execs are by and large not motivated to understand what customers want. They are only concerned with maximizing revenue (from selling points) and minimizing costs (by selling seats instead of making them available for awards)