Earlier this month, British Airways introduced Avios, a new name for miles. Now if you’re a member of the BA Executive Club or Iberia Plus, you will earn Avios when you fly, use a credit card, etc. In other words, it’s a shared currency that can be used across airlines under the same ownership. There has been a lot of criticism about redemption levels, but on the bright side, a new elite tier was introduced. I spoke with Simon Talling-Smith, Executive Vice-President, The Americas at British Airways to talk about this and more, including the dreaded fuel surcharge.

Cranky: Let’s talk about some of the changes. It looks like on the elite side, it’s the new tier?

Simon Talling-Smith: Exactly right. We’ve launched a new Bronze tier. Really, a lot of the benefits customers accrued started at our Silver level. We knew there was a big segment of active customers who were not making that Silver level but we still wanted to have a more engaged relationship. So we’ve introduced this Bronze tier. It allows people to enter at half the points of the Silver tier. It gives them substantial benefits like First Class check-in, a better chance to do seat selection, and a 25 percent uplift on Avios when they fly.

Cranky: Can you explain how the tier points work? I see for Bronze, it’s 300 tier points to qualify.

Simon: We distinguish between qualifying points and earn and burn mileage. The qualifying points are our tier points and those are earned by flying, pretty much only by flying. And they accrue over a period of a year and that qualifies you for a level in the Executive Club. Then the following year you need to attain a certain amount of miles to retain that level, but it’s easier for retention than to initially earn it.

Cranky: If I’m new to BA, what kind of flying do I need to do to get 300 tier points?

Simon: A lot of ways to do that.

Cranky: Ok, so I’m in the US and I’ll likely be going over to the UK.

Simon: It’s probably only a couple of Business Class flights per year that will get you into Bronze.

Cranky: I assume part of the motivation for creating this tier was to help align better with American?

Simon: Yeah, both American and Iberia both offer that extra tier. And of course oneworld as a whole has a name for it; it’s Ruby.

Cranky: Beyond elite, earning has not changed, is that correct? If I fly from LA to London I still earn the same?

Simon: Yes.

Cranky: But redemption has changed fairly dramatically.

Simon: Redemption has changed in terms of redeeming your Avios points. Instead of having quite crude and large zones that we carved the network up into, there’s a finer level of segmentation now so different flights may have different redemption levels. It’s not as granular as mileage pricing, but there are are a number of different levels. We have quite a cool map-based calculator to help people.

Cranky: There’s no award chart, right? It’s more opaque than that. You have to put in where you want to go and it’ll spit out how many points.

Simon: Yeah, what we’ve done is basically create nine zones in the world.

Cranky: So why isn’t there an award chart? I was thinking it was much more complex than that.

Simon: The problem is that it’s fairly easy to do that when you’re just flying BA, but as soon as you start to include partners, it starts to get a bit more complicated. So when we wrestled with doing a straightforward redemption table, it became quite unwieldly.

Cranky: If it’s BA, you get up to one connection and it’s journey based, but on partners, it’s leg by leg.

Simon: Exactly.

Cranky: There’s been a fair bit of criticism about what’s being considered a devaluation. I think the claim was that the cost of redemption would go down on most itineraries, but that was really just online BA itineraries to and from London. How much attention do you pay to the criticism, and are you looking at making tweaks?

Simon: I’ve read some of the same feedback on FlyerTalk and we’ve been quite active in that space in responding to questions in there. And to some extent, communicating in the world of frequent fliers is a bit complicated with all the rules. When you communicate change, it’s important to stay close to the customer. In particular we did clarify that statement. It’s something like 97% of online journeys with BA are the same or better.

Cranky: Yeah, that’s what it was.

Simon: And then once you start to add partners it gets more complicated. But of course because some of the online journeys are better, you can get situations where online plus partner is still better than it was before. It’s pretty complex, but yes, we are getting a lot of feedback especially from specific groups of people who are focused on partner jounreys and we’re doing our best to follow up with them.

Cranky: So have you identified areas where you said, “maybe we should make a little change”?

Simon: I haven’t done that yet. It’s a little bit early. With a change of this scale, you need to find out what turns out to be frequent significant issues and then start working on them. But at the moment, it’s so early into the change that I think it would be just a little bit too soon to start making the tweaks. We may well make some tweaks, but it’ll be further down the road.

Cranky: But you are paying attention.

Simon: Yeah, we watch FlyerTalk, we’re completely on top of the tweets, we have an active presence on FlyerTalk where people are engaged. So we take all of that, that whole space of blogs and more generic social media very seriously because that’s where people are talking about our brand and we need to be very responsive.

Cranky: Can you talk about what spurred the change to the redemption scheme? I mean, I understand the change to Avios to try to get a shared currency, but in terms of changing the way the redemptions work. What was the thought process?

Simon: I think again sort of opportunity to react to a bit of feedback that we’ve been accruing over years since we last made a change. Customers had been saying “the scheme you’ve got is a bit unwieldy.” Of course a lot of people’s feedback and critique comes down to whether they perceive the number of miles they pay on a journey to be fair or not. And if you have a more granular level of charges, then you’re always going to have a more fair selection. That’s because you have very big regions and the shortest in the region and longest in the region are the same price and people ask why. That’s a big driver.

Cranky: The differentiation between partner awards and BA awards, was that an issue of aligning your incurred costs with mileage spend?

Simon: That was very simple. We have individual exchange arrangements with all those partners, so to some extent when people start flying on partner networks we have to recognize the rules and structure of that partner’s program as well.

Cranky: But you’re not differentiating redemption values by partner at this point, right?

Simon: That’s right.

Cranky: I think that’s all I have, but if you do start looking at changes, I’d love to see the fuel surcharge dropped.

Simon: Yeah, if you could just lean on those guys at OPEC to reduce the barrel price, we’ll be dropping the fuel surcharge quickly.

Cranky: I’m sure that’s something you hear a lot of.

Simon: All I can tell you is that not only does the fuel surchrge not cover the cost of fuel but it doesn’t cover the increase in the cost of fuel.

Cranky: Right, but if it’s a redemption ticket, it’s a question of whether people earned the right to not pay that. We could probably discuss this as a scholarly level.

Simon: The basic math is that if the fuel price goes up so that we end up paying $100 more to carry someone across the Atlantic, the surcharge allows us to recover some of that but it’s not $100. We have to recover that from somewhere else. We don’t want to take that out of any part of the customer experience. We don’t have to have lower quality food or anything else. So that leaves us in the uncomfortable position of having to surcharge while the fuel prices are so high.

Cranky: Did I miss anything?

Simon: I guess the other thing to say is that the relaunch is part of a much bigger program of investment. We’ve said it’s about 5 billion pounds including everything from lounges to service experience to the aircraft themselves to technology. We’re into a very big investment at BA and we see that going on for a number of years.

To learn more about Avios, visit British Airways online.

I’ve pulled a controversial story out from the archives today. It’s one that was supposed to run on BNET at the beginning of the year, but after heated back and forth discussion, it was shelved by the higher-ups. (They didn’t like me ripping apart another BNET article, it seems.) I actually meant to publish it here on Cranky after my BNET run ended, but it just sat forgotten, gathering dust in my drafts folder. I was browsing through old drafts the other day and realized it never went live. So, here it is . . . .

—
When a Southwest pilot held a plane for a man who was traveling to be with his daughter in the wake of his granddaughter’s murder, the media erupted with joy. Some people even went as far as calling the pilot a hero. I suppose it’s no surprise, though I can only shake my head and grind my teeth at such loose use of the word.

Heartwarming tales like this one gain a power of their own, and simple actions can be turned into insanely overblown feats of awesomeness. In 25 years, they might call this man a saint for what he did; simply holding an airplane for 12 minutes may morph into him deciding to turn an airplane around against all odds after it took off just to pick this man up. Why do I say that? It’s happened before and will happen again.

Case in point. Peter Greenberg wrote about this Southwest pilot here on BNET. He told a tale of a story that he “wrote years ago.” Too bad this one doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Peter recounts that a passenger was flying on the last flight of the day from Minneapolis to Chicago. He stopped the pilot and told him that he was going to Chicago only to spend the night and fly to Rochester, Minnesota in the morning to get his sick son to the Mayo Clinic. I’ll let him take it from there.

“I looked at the route map in your inflight magazine,” the father said, “and noticed you fly right over Rochester on the way to Chicago. Do you think you could just stop and drop us off?”

The pilot thought about it. Then he called air traffic control and explained the situation. Could they possible [sic] route his flight with a stop in Rochester and still get him to Chicago just a little late? After all, it was the last flight of the day and no passengers were connecting to onward flights.

The word from the ATC: Go for it.

In the end, the pilot asked the passengers for permission and they unanimously agreed. And to add a cherry to this sundae, the flight still arrived in Chicago 10 minutes early.

It’s definitely a warm and fuzzy story, but there are so many holes in it that it could double as Swiss cheese.

If this pilot really wanted to help the passenger get to the Mayo Clinic, he should have given him cab fare. The Mayo Clinic is a mere 80 miles on a straight shot from Minneapolis/St Paul Airport. So the idea that someone was taking his sick child to the Mayo Clinic via an overnight in Chicago is downright absurd.

There’s also the issue of why Northwest, an airline with a massive hub in Minneapolis, would route someone via Chicago anyway. The airline did fly from Chicago to Rochester at one point, but it’s been 25 years or more since that happened. Northwest has, however, long had nonstops between Minneapolis and Rochester going all day long. That continues today despite the short distance.

But if that’s not enough, I’ve never heard of anyone asking air traffic control for permission to go somewhere. Sure, if it’s a congested airport and there are weather problems then you may be delayed going into that airport, but I think we can all assume that Rochester has never had that problem. And can we really believe that there was enough schedule padding that long ago that even with a time-consuming stop, the flight would have arrived 10 minutes early? How much of this story could possibly be true?

That’s hard to say, but by now it’s traveled through multiple mouthpieces, likely amplified every single time to get to the point it’s at now. It’s become a tall tale, and Peter ran with it here. (I asked him multiple times for a copy of the original story he wrote, but he was unable to provide one.)

In the end, people simply like to latch on to stories that warm the cockles, and this is certainly one of them. But as time passes, these stories aren’t necessarily closely tied to reality. Should stories like this become reality more often? I doubt it’s even possible, but certainly things like holding a plane for 12 minutes should happen from time to time. Oh wait, it already does happen all the time.

People at Southwest and other airlines decide to hold flights day in and day out for one reason or another. I don’t want to take anything away from the captain at Southwest who made the decision to hold the flight. That was a great thing to do, but a delayed connection, a late customer running through security; these are all things that happen on a daily basis and airline employees rarely get credit for it. I guess the right combination of a heartbreaking story, a great quote, and some media coverage can create a story (real or not) that lasts forever.

Update: Thanks to reader FBKSan who found the original article from Peter Greenberg in 1990! As I responded in the comments, there were a ton of inconsistencies:

Thanks FBKSan!

One of the big complaints people have about airline fees is the ability to figure out exactly what’s being charged. It can be confusing but most of the sites that try to aggregate fees seem to only give you long lists that don’t really help that much. Now there’s a new site that takes the next step toward calculating fees for you. It’s better than most of what’s out there today, but it still has a ways to go before it’s truly a great option. Still, it’s the best we have so far, so if you have bag fee questions give iflybags.com a shot.

The site lets you enter your flight information and it spits out what bag fees will be. Here’s the advanced search screen:

You can enter your flight info and it will spit back how much your bag fees will be. It even lets you enter if you have elite status or not, so you can check to see if you’re exempt (though you likely know you’re exempt if you’re an elite). Where is all this data coming from? The airlines.

Most airlines file their fares and fare rules with a central clearinghouse called the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO). ATPCO created a new category that lets airlines file their bag fees in a standardized manner, and this new site is just putting a pretty face on that data. So if the data isn’t filed correctly or isn’t filed at all, this site won’t help. But for the vast majority of trips that Americans take, this will work quite nicely. (Even Southwest participates.)

You can use the site two ways. You can either look up the fees for the number of bags you’re planning on checking, or you can just use the site as a reference to look up the airline bag fee policies. It gets pretty deep into the weeds – if you need to check a bow and arrow, this will help. Though the reference guide is really just a long list of bag fees and isn’t the most user-friendly.

This all sounds good, right? So why do I say that it has a ways to go? Because this is really only helpful if you know the flight you’re taking. If you bought that ticket on Delta and you want to know how much you’re going to have to shell out, that’s great. But what if you’re shopping around, looking for flights to a city and a lot of airlines pop up as options? Are you really going to look up every single flight’s bag fees after you find the fares for each one? I think not. If you do, you have way too much time on your hands.

What really needs to exist is a site where you can search for flights and then specify the number of bags you’ll check. That will be married with the price for each flight so you can make an informed decision.

The ability to do this is there – ATPCO has an XML feed that could be integrated by developers. It just has to happen. The company behind iflybags is Farelogix. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Farelogix is one of the companies that provides direct connect technology to help airlines bypass the Global Distribution Systems (GDS). You can be sure that Farelogix has a good reason to do this. It will once again help prove that direct connect technology doesn’t hide fees and make shopping more difficult. This is one example of that, but it’s a visible one and it’s good for consumers.

So, if you need bag fee info for your trip, this is the place to go. Hopefully we’ll see it integrated into a booking site soon enough.

In general, the renaming of a regional airline isn’t a very interesting thing. After all, travelers never buy tickets to fly on that specific airline. Instead, they buy tickets from the mainline airline, which then contracts for the regional carrier to do the flying. Many travelers won’t even know which airline they are flying on. But in the case of the ASA-ExpressJet merger, the renaming turned into a saga that was a fun story to watch. And now we finally have resolution using a very familiar name.

In short, here’s what happened:

Now for the long story.

ExpressJet is best known for being the main provider of Continental Express service. The airline was owned by Continental but after it was spun off, it started trying to find its own way. You probably remember its 2007 effort to start point-to-point flying between smaller markets. That failed for a variety of reasons, but I still liked the idea.

The end of the road came when SkyWest decided to buy ExpressJet and merge it with its Atlantic Southeast Airlines (ASA) subsidiary.

The new combined management got to work on picking a name for the new
airline, and the result was a disaster. In July, it was announced that the new name would be SureJet.

SureJet? It had the ring of a consulting project gone wrong. The press release made it sound like the management team was trying to be inclusive in the naming process, but it forgot to actually check to see if the name sounded good on it own.

“SureJet” was developed using front-line employee feedback about qualities and characteristics such as assurance, reliability and trustworthiness. . .

All great things, but instead of actually just running a great airline, the company decided it needed to have a name that reflected it. It really came off as an airline trying to convince itself and its partners that it was a reliable airline, whether it was or not.

Less than week later, the name was shelved for good reason. Everyone hated it. In fact, the company was very up front about it.

Since the announcement, we have heard significant concerns from team members about the name SureJet, and it appears we’ve missed our mark.

And that was that. Fast forward to last week, and a new, or shall I say old, name resurfaced. The combined airline will now be known as . . . ExpressJet.

Atlantic Southeast dates back to 1979 when it started flying for Delta regionally with props, and it’s seemingly had an identity crisis at many different points. Since the early days, it was closely tied with Delta when it flew solely for the airline.

In 1999, Delta even bought the airline and held it until it sold in 2005 to SkyWest. The airline had fluctuated between the Atlantic Southeast and ASA names for years. To me, it was never a strong moniker.

ExpressJet certainly started off tied at the hip with Continental as Continental Express, but it moved away from that under the ExpressJet name as a newly-independent airline. The ExpressJet name defines the airline and its role well. It makes sense to just keep that name instead of creating a new one.

Management isn’t completely leaving ASA out in the cold. It’s keeping the logo and branding from ASA (in the few places where branding exists for regionals), just changing the name on it.

This doesn’t always work, but in this case, it seems like a good fit. And management looks good for actually listening to the feedback and taking it to heart. Maybe they’ll also dial back on the consultants over there as well after this whole thing.

Those of you who used to read me over on BNET know that I used to spend a solid week each year looking at my favorite Small Community Air Service Development Program (SCASDP) proposals. Since I’m no longer writing for BNET, I spent a lot less time reviewing the program this year, and that makes me sad. I have fun with this. And yes, this year I’m late. The awards already came out, but that won’t stop me from talking about them.

By “favorite,” I don’t mean I look at those proposals that are great. I’m talking about those that seem outrageously misguided to me. The point of the program is a good one. Unlike Essential Air Service which just continuously plows money into small city routes, SCASDP is a short term funding plan that requires serious justification. The money should be used for helping to jumpstart new service through revenue guarantees, marketing, etc. There are a few uses but the point is the same. Money is meant to help get a project on its feet, but it won’t be there forever.

There have been successes. SCASDP has been responsible for successful long-running routes from Akron/Canton and Santa Rosa, for example. These are routes that airlines might not have tried on their own, but with the financial backing initially, they found them to be winners. And plenty of airports are trying to do just that right now. Many of these are small cities trying to get connected into a hub. Others are trying to get low cost service, often from Frontier this year it seems.

So which ones stood out for me? Here are 9 of the goofiest ones. I’m sad to say that three of these actually got awarded a grant. Oy vey.

• Albany, New York (WON) – Albany wants money to fund a flight to Houston, but that seems like a waste to me. It already has service from United and Southwest to several cities so it has access to their networks without having to go to Houston. Seems to me that the feds should have looked for proposals that would have had more of a network benefit than this, but the feds liked it and it got partial funding.
• Arcata/Eureka, California (LOST) – Like every other airport, Eureka complains of high fares on its sole flights on United to San Francisco and Sacramento. So what’s the solution? It wants nonstop flights to Denver, on United, the same airline that has high fares today. All this would do is hurt United’s existing service and make the market weaker overall. It won’t lower fares. Delta failed with flights to Salt Lake and Alaska/Horizon failed down to LA. This market just can’t support more service right now, it would seem.
• Bakersfield, California (LOST) – I don’t even get this. Bakersfield wants money to support 2 props a day up to Sacramento on Great Lakes. Without any connecting feed in Sacramento, this is bound to fail. There is a strange suggestion that there will be another 20 people connecting to Portland or Seattle. Really? I can’t see it – people going there would probably just take an existing airline that actually offers online connections.
• Bemidji, Minnesota (LOST) – I’ll give these guys points for creativity. They seem to think that people don’t fly out of Bemidji because they don’t know the airport has flights. So what will they do? Create a travel desk to book flights for people in Bemidji and those coming to town. This just isn’t going to do much since we all know that people coming to town aren’t going to call Bemidji to have flights booked. And locals should know the airport exists – they just drive because it’s cheaper or flights are more convenient from other airports.
• Casper, Wyoming (LOST) – Casper thinks that fares are too high on the short flight down to Denver on United. So what does it want? It wants Frontier to come in to lower fares. It says it asked United to lower fares to levels seen during the 1990s and early 2000s but was rebuffed. Apparently it forgot that fuel has spiked dramatically. So if Frontier comes in, what happens? It could push United to run away because lower fares will destroy the market. Then Casper would be pretty unhappy.
• Dubuque, Iowa (WON) – I love Dubuque because it has had some great, creative proposals in the past that didn’t win. So what happens? The city comes up with a not-so-good one and it wins. Go figure. Dubuque has been losing service and now it only has American Eagle flights to Chicago. What does it want? American flights to Dallas. This won’t help fares and it will likely weaken the Chicago flights by pulling people away. There’s limited additional benefit to Dubuque, but guess what? It’s going to get a shot to see if it works.
• Flagstaff, Arizona (WON) – Flagstaff is like many small cities in thinking that it’s perpetually underserved and it deserves better than what it gets. In this case, that’s turboprop flights to Phoenix. It also says fares are too high. In fact, it says the average fare is $58 one way higher than Phoenix. That doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me, but Flag thinks it knows that the premium should only be $30 to $35 one way. So Flagstaff wants a new airline to come in. It did have Alaska/Horizon to LA for a brief time but that failed. Why would some other service work? It won’t. But it won a grant, so we’ll probably see someone else come in soon.
• Mammoth Lakes, California (LOST) – Mammoth gets the brass balls award for having the gall to ask for this one. It has been subsidizing year-round flights, but it doesn’t have the money to continue. Without more money, the non-winter flights will probably go away, so it wants the feds to pump more money in. If the service doesn’t work now, then why would federal funds make it work? It wouldn’t.
• Marquette, Michigan (LOST) – Marquette is on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, meaning it’s basically Canada. So it wants service to the state capital, Lansing, because you can only get there via connections today. The problem is that a Marquette to Lansing flight will never have enough demand to support itself, ever. So why bother throwing money down a hole to subsidize it for a short time knowing it won’t work? There’s no good reason.

In the end, the feds selected 29 winners. That means more than 40 percent of applicants got a grant. Not too shabby. There were some winners that I liked to see. For example, I think Auburn/Lewiston, Maine had a good pitch for finally getting its first scheduled flights. I also think Latrobe, Pennsylvania has a good case for trying to further build its newly-acquired flights from Spirit. In fact, I’d say that this year, I probably liked what the DOT did more than in previous years, though clearly we still have some strong disagreements. That’s no surprise. Read the full list of grants here.

But congratulations to all the communities that won new service. Even if I’m skeptical in some cases, I hope that you can all make it work.

[Original photo via Flickr user Jeff Samsonow/CC 2.0]