If an airline has an award-winning Business Class product as it is the case with Oman Air, it’s always a bit pity if you can’t really take advantage of it as frequent flyer. That’s why Sindbad members will be grateful to note that they cannot only get mileage upgrades from the most expensive Economy booking classes to Business Class on Oman Air flights as of today, but also from all other booking classes. However, a total of four different award levels were introduced in function of the fare category what makes the whole thing not really cheap from the lower fares – and the use of a full award flight in Business Class makes probably more sense like that.

Compared to the image of Virgin Atlantic at the end of the century, its star started to lose its brightness already some time ago. This process has even accelerated following the participation of Delta Air Lines of 49%. In addition, also Air France KLM will now take over another 31% of the capital. The positioning of Virgin risks becoming even less clear like that. Unfortunately, also the Flying Club is not exempted from these changes. While many strenghts are maintained for the time being, latest changes – such as the new accumulation and redemption rules on Delta coming into force on September 01 – are a mix of copies of British Airways’ Executive Club and a lack of transparency as practiced by Delta in its SkyMiles program, what not necessarily inspires confidence for the future. A partnership with Air France KLM has, by the way, not yet been implemented, but should follow soon, what would open up new opportunities for Flying Club members regarding the use of awards, notably within Europe.

One of the strong points of the JetPrivilege program of Jet Airways is the impressive network of partner airlines, allowing members to pool miles from airlines, which don’t appear together in any other program. However, this will soon be a thing of the past or at least significantly reduced since the program will lose several major airline partners over the coming months. Partnerships with Swiss and Austrian will be terminated on September 30, with Turkish Airlines on October 31 and with Lufthansa and American Airlines on December 31. Of course, the partnership network remains rich afterwards with partners including Air France, KLM or Delta in the Western world, but as the program as such might not be the most attractive one, it risks losing the main argument speaking in favour of it.

Not so long ago, we heard from Etihad that its strategic focus would be on a close cooperation with Air France KLM. This never went beyond some code-share flights and the initially announced FFP tie-up hasn’t materialised until now. As in its usual regular intervals, Etihad is now changing completely its strategy and wants to cooperate with Lufthansa. Probably Lufthansa’s (true!) strategic attempt to weaken Air Berlin by buying its valuable assets from Etihad was misinterpreted at Etihad in a sense that they are friends now… What this has to do with above news about JetPrivilege, which has just chosen the opposite way, to strengthen its relationship with Air France KLM and to stop the relationship with the Lufthansa Group? JetPrivilege is majority controlled by Etihad and as such supposed to have some strategic alignment. But probably even at an internal level within the Etihad Airways Partners, nobody knows anymore what the exact strategy at a given moment is… How ever Etihad wants to turn around its huge losses with such confusing behaviour is difficult to see. And Etihad Guest members should definitely watch very closely what happens to their FFP!

The strength of most Frequent Flyer Programs is in explaining to their members how they can earn a lot of miles by spending a lot. But Turkish Airlines thinks a bit further and helps now its Miles&Smiles members to acquire the tools first to be able to earn a lot of money through a decent education. Thanks to a new partnership between the program and Istanbul Aydin University, members can now earn one mile per Turkish Lira spent for master’s, doctorate and continuing education programs. We cannot judge what the real value of that education for the rest of the life is – but worst case, one starts its career at least with a nicely filled Frequent Flyer account…