I wouldn’t say I travel a lot. But I probably travel more than the average guy. For those of us who are cost-concious, we definitely know there are a lot of sites out there trying to get us to use them to plan our flight, hotel and car rental. Well, the primary vendors (the actual airlines and hotels) only have one way to really fight to keep people using their sites – Loyalty Programs.
Unfortunately, most of these programs read like a prenuptial agreement. Not only does your distance of flight and duration of stay affect the total rewards you earn, but once you get the points, you’re subject to upgrade limits, blackout dates and capacity constraints for members. Hmm…It’s almost as if they don’t want you to use your hard-earned rewards in the first place.
We say take a page out of Southwest Airlines’ book, guys. Points are in the single digits, not the 1000′s. Regardless of whether you’re flying from LA to Vegas or to NYC, you get a point. When you fly home, you get another point. If you stop somewhere inbetween (intentionally…not a layover), you get ANOTHER point. Once you’ve got 16 points, you get a free flight, anywhere. The end.
At first glance, it looks like you could pretty easily scam this system by flying between two close cities repeatedly and then flying to the other end of the country on your free flight. Yep. You scammed them out of the $200 difference between the two flights. I’d bet after eight round-trips and not having to build a system to assign point values to flights and costs to redemptions, they saved far more than that. Plus, now you’re probably pretty loyal to them.
Simplicity helps people see the reality in what you’re offering. The more chances for confusion, the less people will care to participate.
