Most travellers are members of certain airline loyalty programme. It’s pretty obvious that they join the programme because they travel a lot and want to get reward for being frequent customers. But do members really benefit from the programmes?
Qantas’s recent announcement of its profits revealed a $328 million earning (before tax) from the frequent-flyer programme. Isn’t the frequent flyer programme supposed to be rewarding loyal customers, how come it is making such a large sum of money? So who were paying this huge amount? Of course THE CONSUMERS!
When customers are redeeming their tickets for travel, they do not actually get them for free, they end up paying via banking fees. Banks have buy points from airlines, but banks would not do it for nothing, so they simply transfer the fees back to customers by charging higher.
Businesses always use different marketing campaigns to make promotions and attract customers. Even when they say there’s a big discount, customers always have to be aware since in most cases, customers themselves are the ones who pay the cost in the end.
The story is written in the inverted pyramid style with most important news at the top, followed by extra details. At the end of the text, the author also provided some extra information on loyalty programmes, such as Virgin Blue allows other options, such as donation, for customers to spend their reward points.
Apart from allowing comments below the article, the author also provided her own email address so that readers can contact her. There is also a source below the article which is a good practice for online stories. People want to see the source materials.
The article covers several news values. It is timeliness since it reports something that has just recently happened. It also has an impact to the readers. According to a piece of news in The Age, here are more than 7 million members in the Qantas Frequent Flyer loyalty scheme. These 7 million people would be interested to know if the programme is, after all, not worth it.
Source:
1. https://shop.velocityrewards.com.au/Pages/SOR/AwardDetails.aspx?AwardId=23122
2. http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/qantas-frequent-flyer-bag-changes-20101006-167tq.html
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