The chaos and panic at Aeroplan (or rather at its owner Aimia) could have filled this newsletter on its own as several, contradicting actions occurred over the last month. First, Aeroplan announced that it would launch charter flights to popular destinations as of 2020 to allow members to redeem miles. Also, the ability for members to transfer miles to other Frequent Flyer Programs was announced. Days later, Air Canada announced that it had made an offer to buy back Aeroplan from Aimia, but Aimia rejected the offer later on. Then Aeroplan announced that small Canadian regional airline Porter Airlines (only operating a limited network in eastern Canada and the US) would become Aeroplan’s preferred airline partner as of 2020 – not necessarily the kind of airline that could replace Air Canada and its Star Alliance partners. Again a few days later, Aeroplan announced that a deal with oneworld would come to life to offer redemption capacity to Aeroplan members. The only thing, which is becoming clear is that nothing is clear and that all these activities, although well intended, contribute to making members panic and cash in their miles as soon as possible. That is certainly not going to help Aimia with its financial troubles either! In the wake of all these activities, AeroMexico also approached Aimia to buy back the 49% stake it holds in AeroMexico’s Club Premier program, but Aimia turned down that offer as well since it considered it undervalued. But the final word in all this is certainly not yet spoken and it is likely that things will turn out differently in the end than what might be expected today.

On April 01, 2019, EL AL’s Matmid Club will change to a revenue basis, but also implement various other changes in parallel. In a nutshell, it can be stated that slightly fewer points will be earned in most cases, but many award levels will be adjusted downwards as well, so that the overall program proposition remains fair. Some other changes are a bit more surprising, however, such as a harmonisation of the elite bonus at 25% at all levels rather than the current differentiated tier bonus between 10 and 70%. Although the changes don’t represent a unilateral downgrade, the program remains obviously only interesting for hard core EL AL customers, with Qantas being the only full airline partner in the program.

Although the recent changes in the program were a small step in the right direction, it might still be difficult to find a lot of good reasons to use Finnair Plus. One of them used to be the fact that Finnair Plus was the last FFP allowing members to accrue 100% of miles flown at all Economy fares on American Airlines. “Used to be” since this benefit was scrapped on August 01 in favour of the usual differentiated accrual structure – whereby even only Premium Economy fares still earn 100% of miles flown (well, kilometres), but all Economy fares earn only 50% or less.

If you’re in the business of renting cars frequently, you should definitely look at Gulf Air’s Falconflyer and Sixt – even if you may otherwise not necessarily care about them. For any online car rental reservation made over a special Gulf Air link until November 15, you earn bonus miles. 1,000 miles each for the first and second reservation and 2,000 miles for each subsequent reservation. Combine this with Gulf Air’s latest 50% redemption offer for its own flights (bookings until September 30 for travel between September 10 and November 30 – upgrades are excluded) and you can really max out the value of the offer. For instance, by renting a car twice a week, you’d earn 22,000 miles over six weeks – and a one-way Business Class flight from Europe or the Far East to Bahrain costs just 24,000 miles under the 50% promotion.

On August 18, the world’s largest hotel loyalty program will come to life when Marriott and Starwood formally merge their programs. This puts pressure on other hotel chains since size is definitely critical in the hotel business. While companies such as Accor react to that through purchasing mostly smaller hotel groups, Hyatt is seeking its fortune in an alliance with the Small Luxury Hotels of the World, which obviously goes well together with the upscale positioning of Hyatt itself. World of Hyatt members will soon be able to earn and redeem points at these hotels, increasing the coverage and relevance of the program especially in Europe and Asia.