Air Canada Gets It Wrong, Again

It is truly astonishing when a company is persistently unable to respect its customers. Customers are of course responsible for every dollar of revenue a company takes in. It is simply not sustainable to abuse your customers except in a monopoly or oligopoly. How fortunate for Air Canada that it is operating in the latter environment. Even so, they continue to push their customers closer and closer to the edge.

This article in today's Globe is worth a read. It isn't anything new for those of us who have been long-standing Aeroplan members and have made use of reward miles. Air Canada's tactics over the past several years have, in my case, driven me from their program. This was relatively painless since I was only using points, not adding to them, since I otherwise took to avoiding Air Canada.

Aeroplan, and similar programs of other airlines, have been commonly known as loyalty programs. The idea being that benefits accrue to those who patronize the sponsoring company for a long period of time.

I won't repeat what the article reports, in particular regarding how Air Canada is whittling away the benefits and costs of remaining a loyal customer. What I do want to do is expand upon a couple of points that the article does not mention.

...Aeroplan spokeswoman JoAnne Hayes ... emphasized that mileage levels required for Classic rewards have been virtually unchanged since Aeroplan was founded in 1984.

In recent months, a round-trip reward flight booked between Toronto and Vancouver cost 25,000 Aeroplan miles, plus an $80 fuel surcharge, $4 in GST on that surcharge and $46.55 in various other fees.

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it. Well it isn't. What Ms. Hayes fails to mention is that the cost to consumers of earning those miles - Air Canada's revenue - has gone up in proportion. That is, we pay more now to acquire points since ticket prices have gone up over the years. It is dishonest to allude to their increased costs without mentioning that so has revenue per mile.

My final point is that Air Canada, by their punitive conditions on redeeming points, is turning their best customers against them. People who have 40,000 points to spend on a winter getaway earned those points by flying with Air Canada, not once, but many times. These are the people they must keep satisfied since they provide so much of their coveted business. Others who scrimp points from LCBO purchases over several years, while certainly not to be abused, are of lesser business importance. Air Canada may get away with their bad behaviour in the latter group, but not the former. Aeroplan has become a disloyalty program.

So, with Air Canada it's still the same old, same old. Hopefully Westjet will dig the knives deeper into Air Canada now that, after all these years, they are planning their own loyalty program. Their record tells me they are more likely to do it right.