Aeroplan has just introduced a couple of rather dramatic changes to their program. For those you not familiar with Aeroplan its Air Canada’s frequent flyer program and designed to be a tool to keep people flying Air Canada. Today they introduce 2 changes:
1/ Expiry on Aeroplan Miles
Points now expire after 7 years and all existing points earned before Jan/2007 will expire Dec 31, 2013.
2/ Automatic Closure of inactive accounts
Accounts not earning points are automatically closed. It appears you need to earn at least 1 point per year or your account will be closed.
If you miles expire or you’re account closes you have to pay $30 + $0.01 per point to get them back.
Frequent Flyers programs can be a sort of ‘golden handcuff’ for travelers. Once you start building up points you want to stick with that company to get maximum value, even if the airline provides absolutely horrible service. I’m surprised that Air Canada would want to risk loosing these customers over something as stupid as point expiry. I would expect that many points are never redeemed or redeemed once for a big family vacation which may not be possible with this new system.
The other group of effected customers is the infrequent flyers that doesn’t fly regularly and will loose their accounts under this program. This seems to open again open Air Canada to competitors without unclear business advantage. Does it really cost so much to keep Aeroplan accounts open per year? Wouldn’t they want to keep the account open so that they could send them spam from partners?
Aeroplan also implies that the changes were required to provide additional reward flights to customers. I’m not sure I see the connection and a couple of checks for flights I had planned for Dec/2006 and July/2007 are not showing additional flights available. I had checked the same flights 2 weeks ago.
Overall a fairly confusing change for a program designed to improve customer loyalty.