The task for Air India was rather easy: to improve its loyalty program Flying Returns. The relaunched program features indeed almost unilateral enhancements, from a non-expiry of miles for active members to lowered award levels, the introduction of a family pool and new non-air partnerships. Whether the switch to a revenue basis for Air India flights is though an improvement is definifely subject to one’s individual assessment, especially as you would not earn any miles on any carrier-imposed surcharges – which represent though often some 50% of the total ticket costs in Economy Class.

Tier qualification levels are fairly low – 30,000 miles for (Star Alliance) Gold status -, but at least 30% of the required points need to be earned on Air India flights. Awards are now priced on a segment basis, but even connecting flights are still cheaper than previously. But whether a nonstop Transatlantic flight in Business Class at 200,000 miles (increasing by up to 104,000 miles if you add connecting flights at both ends) really makes Flying Returns the “most rewarding program” in the market – according to Air India’s own claims – is more than doubtful.

Air India’s sister company Vistara continues to operate, at least for now, its own program Club Vistara.

August 31 will be the last day when one of the five founding members of the Star Alliance, SAS, will be a member of the latter – before joining SkyTeam on the following day. What this exactly means for its EuroBonus members remains to be seen as the information available at this point remains limited. Of course, status and points will be honoured, but there will certainly be more details to be considered.

So for now, just take it as good news that the EuroBonus program will survive as independent program although SAS is now partially owned by Air France KLM. And you consider whether you’d rather fly on Lufthansa or Air France, on Korean Air or ANA, on United or Delta etc. and choose like that to redeem any points over the next few months or wait until September to start doing so!

There are other programs offering regularly interesting award sales, think Flying Blue or Miles & More. Though valuable, these offers always have some kind of last minute character, making it some times a bit difficult to adjust to.

Alaska Airlines goes a different way with its new quarterly Global Getaways offers in its Mileage Plan: They can be booked during one month, but for a travel date a few months out. For instance, in April, you can book discounted offers for travel between September and November.

And the other interesting fact is that they are exclusively available on their wide range of partners! They are offered at a 50% discount, but are only availabe in Economy and Premium Economy – and only for flights originating in the US. But getting for 20,000 miles one-way to the Fiji or for 30,000 miles to Zanzibar is definitely a good deal!

While the offer/program might not be worth going out of its way, you should though definitely consider it if you plan to fly with Emirates or Flydubai anyway until June 30: Booking your flights by April 18 (and registering for the offer) lets you earn double miles on almost all flights in their Skywards program. Only flights to/from India are excluded, whereby it is not clear how a flight such as New York-Dubai-India is handled, i.e. whether you’d still earn double miles at least on the New York segment.

But as always if an offer is not fully clear, you should better not take a risk of being disappointed in the end.

Turkish Airlines has rebranded its long-standing subsidiairy AnadoluJet as AJet and positions it more with a low cost profile. This places it more as competitor to other low cost carriers like Pegasus Airlines.

That’s why it is even more surprising that AJet does no longer participate in the Turkish program Miles&Smiles, neither offers any own loyalty product. This is clearly a missed opportunity for an easy competitive edge and obviously adds another dimension to the loss of appeal of Miles&Smiles, following the recent massive program devaluation.

Logically, AJet doesn’t participate in any other of the handful of Star programs in which AnadoluJet used to participate anymore either.