22/08/2005

The crane feeds on chocolate

Odd. I am comparing offers for getting to Washington DC in about a month's time. The comparison between the respective offerings of Lufthansa & Swiss strike me as rather odd if you take into account collectable airmiles: From BSL to IAD on business, I get some 12K miles on Swiss, but over 20K miles on Lufthansa - that's 67% more! Travelclub tells me that this is because LH premiums cost more miles, so collecting returns more miles. Considering that LH goes to DC directly (no changing planes in BOS) and costs about the same, there's no way I can justify flying Swiss, especially since the airmiles get credited to my Travelclub account as well. If I didn't know that this arbitrage option is a consequence of the newly available fungibility between the two pre-existing programmes, I'd say it's a scheme to lure paying customers away from Swiss to Lufthansa, with premium collectors going the other way ... I wonder how long Swiss will survive this cannibalisation by its very own mother!

3 comments:

Joel said...

So Swiss is the bastard child of Luthansa after its careless nurturing of Sabena. Tough love.

Don't forget that British Airways was very keen to get its hands on the Swiss FF programme given its perceived saturation with HNWI customers.

Accept that (i) Switzerland is too small to support its own airline and (ii) you'll be flying on LH a lot more :-(

Chris said...

Hmm, do I sense a certain animosity towards the Swiss airline industry here, if the close proximity of "Swiss" & "bastard" is any indication? How so?

Joel said...

Bastard in the slang sense of unwanted or fatherless rather than nasty.

In retrospect I was wrong to link the new Swiss with the old Swiss; but I had a relative who was a senior manager with Sabena and then Swiss. Never post after drinking!