What Motivates You?

I was reading an article on the CBS Moneywatch site about strange and unusual benefits offered to frequent fliers on certain airlines, and reflecting that many of these offerings are just as far off target as the mainstream awards with which they were meant to compete. Most people who travel by air have already encountered the typical awards programs – collect miles traveled on an airline or dollars spent on a credit card tied to the same account, and receive credits towards free airline tickets and/or free upgrades to tickets you purchase on your own. Some of these programs also offer free nights in hotels, free rental cars, or discounts on various travel services, and as the competition between the surviving airlines grows more intense, many of these frequent flyer deals are doing away with expiration dates, holiday blackouts and other restrictions. But while these programs may make air travel more affordable, unless you spend all of your points on fare upgrades they will not make the experience any more enjoyable…

Some of these non-standard rewards attempt to address this shortcoming by offering benefits that will add to your existing travel plans. Air Baltic’s free dogsled ride could be fun, as would the weekend in Sweden’s famous Ice Hotel offered by SAS, and anyone who drinks wine might enjoy the wine club membership offered by Qantas. Southwest can hook you up with a trip to Air Combat USA, where you can fly jet trainers and learn how to be a fighter pilot, while American offers a beer-tasting tour in Brussels and Virgin Atlantic offers a seat on a sub-orbital space flight – although that last one will take a lot of miles to purchase. But I still think they’re missing a bet here…

One of the big problems with frequent flyer programs is the perception that you have to fly all of the time to gain any rewards at all – an image that is reinforced by the 25,000 to 50,000 air miles needed to get a single free ticket (that’s 10 to 20 cross-country hops, or more than most people fly in a decade). And, in fairness, a free ticket to anywhere is a huge expense for the airline – we’ve discussed in this space how such tickets are effectively taking on unproductive debt. But the airlines could deal with both of these issues by allowing customers to cash in smaller numbers of miles for smaller rewards, thus eliminating both the perception of limited utility and the huge burden of unpaid customer benefits. Imagine if a specific carrier allowed you to get your checked-bag fees waived for just a few thousand points. Or if they allowed you to pay for your seat selection (window and aisle seats cost extra on many flights now), flight reservation, advance check-in or on-board snacks using frequent-flyer points. Any average flyer could see benefits to such a program after a single flight, and the potential cost to the carrier would be minimized…

Of course, if the airlines really wanted to get creative, there are any number of other incentives they could offer passengers through a frequent-flyer system. We’ve already discussed the idea of child-free and child-friendly sections of an airplane; it wouldn’t take much more to offer family-friendly waiting areas (or even private cubicles) on the ground, or any number of other services for travelling parents. By the same token, you could easily offer adult-only services to older passengers travelling without minors (uncensored movies, quiet areas in the terminal, free alcohol) at minimal cost to the airlines that would simultaneously reward the customer and eliminate the expense of free tickets. Such measures might not help in promoting the airline – they won’t bring you funny stories on Moneywatch, for example. But in terms of promoting the company while reducing its effective debt load, they might be worth a try…