Frustrating Airmiles

Show me one frequent flier (FF) who is not enamoured of the airline programmes (AFFP), has not been disillusioned by the deliberately quirky processes involved but still firmly attached to them as if bonded by fevicol.  Such an individual would be a rarity because `who can walk away, leaving behind beckoning free trips on the table'? Every frequent flier gets hooked on to a couple or more AFFPs, lured by the justifiable desire to snare a few free flights or upgrades.  I have been, too! To some extent, the free flights do materialise pretty easily.  But, sometimes the experience of dealing with the airline miles can be frustrating, enervating and irritating, all at once.  And to rub salt into the raw wound, that would transpire at the most inopportune moment, when you are least prepared for dealing with the googlies the airlines bowl at you.

It is a fact of life that most of the accruals of free miles happen during your working days - when you fly hither and thither like a headless chicken at your employer's cost.  Since someone else is paying and booking, you dont have to worry about the cost and just demand that the secretary book the seat on the most expensive flight of the day of your favourite airline, possibly accruing the most miles possible.  Nobody bothers when you use those miles to book tickets for personal travels.  Or almost, so.  In the late eighhties, some organizations sought to find out the quantum of benefits employees were collectively enjoying from free miles `donated' by them, as an invisible perquisite.  A feeble attempt was made to monetise that benefit and somehow get a share for the organization itself.  Some oversmart Financial Whizkid dreamt of winning a fat paycheque for saving the organization a lot of money.  But nothing came out of that because the entrenched group of beneficiary bandicoots included everyone from the top to bottom and everyone was most averse to let go. The free miles bonanza continued happily for the gleeful employees and AFFPs multiplied merrily over the years.   

If you have multiple AFFP memberships, you always end up confused as to which one you should patronize when it is time to book tickets.  You waste hours shuttling between various airline sites until you get vertigo - trying to analyse, compare and decide.  By the time the fatigued mind gives up and a less than optimal decision is forcibly made, the prices would have ramped up significantly, thereby annulling the skimpy benefits of the miles you would get.  After all this, when you want to avail of that elusive free flight, you will find that you have tantalizingly 2500 miles/points short of what a free flight to any destination would entail. To add some spice, when you are trying to book a new ticket, you invariably find that the airline offering you the cheapest and most convenient flight is not among your AFFPs; since that is the most attractive on offer, you snatch that and no miles accrue for that flight with any current AFFP for you, as a consequence.  Unless, of course, you being the typical FF sucker who is a smart-alec, decide to add one more, new AFFP to your priceless collection, thereby further diminishing your chances of getting a free flight in the near future because you are not concentrating all your free miles in one AFFP!

When you are looking for the free flight, invariably you will find, initially to your astonishment until you get used to the idea, that the only available flights leave at some god-forsaken time like 3.30 am or 11.45 pm. If you opt for either, you would spend double the amount you saved with free miles for transportation to the airport at an unearthly hour. Add to that a sleepless night either way and the resultant groggy state the next day.  Another spanner the machiavellian airlines throw into the machinery is to show you flights with more than 2 connections to your destination, hiding away all the direct flights.  So, a flight which should take about 3 hours in all, will be completed in 11 hours, with multiple layovers in the boondocks.  You will be so bushed when you are done, as if you had undertaken a trans continental flight. Why would one choose this? You won't. Since the average avaricious human being never learns any lesson, you fly a new airline, become member of another AFFP and further disperse your free miles as a disadvantaged flier, never to reap a benefit any time soon.  

Fortunately, most of the airlines do not attach an expiry date for their miles (in USA and Europe), so your meagre miles continue to languish endlessly in the account without ever getting you a free flight. But, be warned, this is just a mirage. Out of the blue, some airlines surprise you with the threat that miles will expire in six months because they were accrued 3 years earlier. Ah, but they offer a marvellous solution.  Now you are enticed to pay for more miles (yes, pay more money) in order to keep the old miles from expiring immediately and postpone the evil day by one more year.  What one does not realise is one year later the ugly situation would repeat itself, given our sloth, with more miles expiring unused, including the ones you `bought' the previous year.  Sometimes, when you receive the bad tidings from the arilines, you go and check their track record with miles and see that they threaten first and months later, unilaterally extend the expiry by six months to one year, with the grandiose declaration that they do so for the `benefit of the patrons'. So, the next time you receive the expiry notice, you are lulled into just ignoring it (at your own peril, of course), being cockily sure that the expiry would be extended as on previous occasions.  But, alas, no - this time the airline actually carries out its threat and denies any further extension.   The problem is you never can predict which way this will go and the airlines keep you guessing always. Now, you have to think of all possible, necessary and wasteful trips you might take in the next few months and book tickets on multiple-hop/red-eye flights, just to use the miles immediately.  You derive that false satisfaction that you are getting some free flights after all!!

If the airlines offer a choice of an immediate discount on the ticket or accrual of miles, I know what I will opt for.  With all this hindsight, I will happily take the immediate monetary benefit instead of the promised lala-land! Even if quantitatively the former is a lesser benefit.  But, I think most fliers would find the thrill of a free flight irresistible, whatever the difficulties involved in getting that flight are!  Human nature - a freebie attracts us like moths to a light.  The airlines know this irrefutable fact and will never change their diabolical ways.  Why would they, when they know the chimera of miles can be used to lure FF members until doomsday??

When we were discussing this, my dear wife, the contrarian that she is, asked sardonically `why would you look a gift horse in the mouth'?  Fair point, but I am not even sure it is a gift horse.  It is labelled that but I am sure we pay the packed-in cost through the higher ticket price every time we buy one!!