Without any advance notice, Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Club has not only adjusted award levels for Delta flights – not in a very dramatic manner -, but also added the same horrendous surcharges on award flights with Delta as on its own flights.

For a roundtrip Transatlantic flight in Business Class, one now pays easily some 1,000 USD. It is clear that this and other recent devaluations in the program are the result of the influence of Virgin’s main stakeholder Delta.

On the other side of the pond, Delta is known for being the best airline with the worst loyalty program. Replicating that same loyalty strategy to its partner Virgin, which remains a distant underdog in its homemarket to the dominant carrier starting with “B”, might though not be the smartest thing to do…

As initially announced, SAS will change from Star Alliance to SkyTeam on September 01 – with corresponding changes for its EuroBonus members. Changes at high level have already been presented – and the good news is that this alliance change will not be misused for some program devaluations.

Award levels stay similar to the current ones, the fairly low tier level qualification criteria stay the same and tier bonuses will be increased. As its main new loyalty competitor/partner – Air France KLM’s Flying Blue – has though a far richer program proposition than SAS’s former (still current) partner Lufthansa, it remains to be seen whether this will be sufficient in the long run.

One of the most remarkable change is though that the whole of Russia was moved out from the zone Europe to Asia. As the most relevant international connections out of Russia are now all to the East, this makes award travel actually much cheaper for flights such as between China and Russia.

If you are an SAS tier member and are nevertheless interested in staying rather in the Star Alliance environment, Lufthansa’s Miles & More program has a status offer you may want to look into.

What has happened so far?

Alitalia spins off its loyalty program MilleMiglia and runs it by Alitalia Loyalty. Alitalia goes out of business, Alitalia Loyalty is renamed into Italia Loyalty and contnues running its program. Alitalia’s successor ITA Airways takes over everything from Alitalia, except its Frequent Flyer Program and creates VOLARE, which never really manages to take off. Trenitalia buys Italia Loyalty. Lufthansa buys ITA. Trenitalia’s CartaFRECCIA program introduces a conversion partnership with VOLARE. For some time, VOLARE will remain a SkyTeam program while ITA will be owned by Lufthansa.

If anybody understands how a customer should behave in such situation, we are eager to hear from you and share your advice with the community.

Everybody with some hopes that Fiji Airways’ becoming a full oneworld member might result in a new attractive loyalty option for the alliance got disappointed: Fiji Airways has announced that it would not develop its existing recognition-only program Tabua Club into a full Frequent Flyer Program, but rather adopt American Airlines’ AAdvantage program as its own program.

Given the general market trend to move away from such structures – which typically only benefit the airline operating the program -, the wisdom of that move needs to be questioned as it is not really clear how the typical Fiji Airways customer would benefit from such set-up.

And for the more global community, it simply means that there is no hope on the horizion for a new, outstanding program within oneworld.

When Air France announced to transfer the bulk of its domestic flights to its low cost subsidiary Transavia, a better integration with Flying Blue was promised.

That integration is now completed and members notably also earn miles and status points at Transavia’s lowest fare category Basic. While the number of status points on domestic flights is equal to what you earn on Air France flights (meaning you won’t climb up the elite ladder very fast with domestic flights only…), you only earn 100 redeemable miles on all flights at Basic fares. Compared to the revenue-based accrual method on Air France flights, this corresponds to a one-way ticket price of 20 EUR.

Whereas this will hardly motivate members to pay much more than on competitors like easyJet on domestic flights, it can be considered a slam in the face if you choose Transavia for its expanding long-haul network, stretching from Dakar to Dubai.

Oh yes, you can also burn Flying Blue miles on Transavia flights. At a revenue-based redemption rate of half a Euro cent per mile.