No Saver Awards in F to MEL

[SMK77]

PPS Club confirmed that SQ is not intending to release any saver awards on the 747 flights to Melbourne. No waitlisting allowed for any flight.

Congrats to the lucky few who grabbed a seat in the very beginning...

[Kyo]

A random search most of yesterday afternoon into early this morning on almost all the ex-Australia routes served by SQ through ANA showed all availability zeroed out from around 19 November and all December (gave up searching by the time I got to 12th January). Seems very deliberate. However, there *is* availability on various flights going down to Oz available...

[milehighj]

It's my personal belief that things will one day reach a point where airlines' FF mileage redemption mechanisms will need to be government regulated, much in the same way banks and other financial institutions are regulated.

FF miles are "currencies" issued by airlines to market & promote their business. Yet they also exercise 100% control over their nominal value, as well "liquidity" - by which these currency holders have an opportunity to spend them.

As someone in the financial services business, how I would love to create 10,000 units of an asset, sell it to 10,000 members of the public, then (a) immediately turn around and devalue it by 50%, (b) tell those 10,000 unit owners that they can only re-sell their units to me, and (c) I only have the capacity to buy back 2 of those 10,000 units per year. Now isn't that a great scheme???

If you think about it, this is fundamentally unfair, and I hope that sooner rather than later, a financial or other government consumer regulator will start looking at this.

[SQflyergirl]

As someone in the financial services business, how I would love to create 10,000 units of an asset, sell it to 10,000 members of the public, then (a) immediately turn around and devalue it by 50%, (b) tell those 10,000 unit owners that they can only re-sell their units to me, and (c) I only have the capacity to buy back 2 of those 10,000 units per year. Now isn't that a great scheme???

Your options are far too generous compared to Krisflyer. You'd be out of business in 3 weeks

[milehighj]

Your options are far too generous compared to Krisflyer. You'd be out of business in 3 weeks

Care to invest?

[SQflyergirl]

Care to invest?

Where do I sign up?

[jhm]

As someone who (like a lot on this board) does manage to get a lot of value out of my miles (compared to many more who don't), I don't want it to be regulated so it's "fairer" for all!

More seriously, isn't limited or no availability and the rules changing part of the "game" which everyone agrees to when we sign up ? If you don't want to play, then pay full price (i.e. use cash rather than points); or move to another FFP (like I did when I dumped KF). I accept that with my FFPs there are limitations - e.g. with BAEC, very limited availability to SIN/BKK/SYD - and plan accordingly.

[KC*]

I just checked using a dummy booking.

Saver F is available to Melbourne on the 744 on 23 Nov 10. Didn't check other dates as this was the first try and it showed up. So I assume there is no blackout.

Anybody interested?

[Kyo]

If there was a *A-redeemable SQ seat on the 21st going out of MEL, I would be

[KC*]

If there was a *A-redeemable SQ seat on the 21st going out of MEL, I would be

It is available online for 21 Nov 2010 using KF miles.

[Kyo]

boos and hissing were heard...

No thank you... I'll make a raft instead...

[milehighj]

As someone who (like a lot on this board) does manage to get a lot of value out of my miles (compared to many more who don't), I don't want it to be regulated so it's "fairer" for all!

More seriously, isn't limited or no availability and the rules changing part of the "game" which everyone agrees to when we sign up ? If you don't want to play, then pay full price (i.e. use cash rather than points); or move to another FFP (like I did when I dumped KF). I accept that with my FFPs there are limitations - e.g. with BAEC, very limited availability to SIN/BKK/SYD - and plan accordingly.

jhm, I'm pretty sure people who invest time (like us on this board? ) to understand the system better will always get more out of it. Regulation isn't going to change that.

There will always be examples of good and bad regulation, and I would NOT suggest "over" regulation. But I do think that simple rules surrounding things such as:

- restricting the percentage of "devalution" an airline can force over a period of time,
- ensuring that there is a minimum amount of "availability" as a ratio to the number of miles issued by an airline,

Surely these are useful to the consumer...? Again if financial services providers are increasingly regulated, why not airline mileage programs?

I agree - to an extent - that we "sign up to the game", and yes for sure mileage redemptions availability should always be less "attractive" than a paid ticket.

But on the other hand, air miles are a financial instrument - they are of significant "value" to many people who accrue them, and they are marketed as such by airlines - and for those reasons surely the airlines should not have 100% carte blanche to devalue them and restrict their usage to the point where they become unusable (in the future)?

[jjpb3]

Very well-argued, milehighj and jhm.

I'm all for the minimum availability requirement, but I do think the optimizing behavior of people like SQTers may make other pax feel as though their options had been limited by the airline (when in fact, canny redeemers grabbed the available seats first). Proving that the availability was there might become quite a regulatory burden (I agree with you, milehighj, it's a burden an entity using those miles to market itself should be prepared to take).

I also like taking the cue from financial services regulation to guide the potential regulatory framework for FF miles. But I feel there's also a limit to the analogy: from my reading, the reason financial services are getting a closer look from regulators is because of the much more dramatic asymmetry in information about underlying asset values, which exists between banks and individual investors. This creates a more serious potential for asset bubbles that destabilize the economy. I have yet to see a destabilizing asset bubble from FF miles , but then again, I don't have visibility into what the financial whiz kids on Wall Street, in the City and in Singapore (what is the equivalent shortcut for Singapore?) are cooking up.