Little book of travel

This is an update of a rant I wrote a while ago on my personal blog. It’s about Eurobonus, the Star Alliance loyalty program. Why? Because it’s a scam, I have no better word for it. I’m sorry for this is going to be a long rant, here’s the initial piece from my other blog:

“I really don’t get it. I’m a frequent flyer and as such I have an airline (or group of airlines) of choice. Simple reason, you try and get as much miles with one and not just shattered around across many different offerings. My choice? Star Alliance. The initial reason for this was because I think flying SAS to our HQ in Seattle is just the best way for me to travel, and once you made the choice you stick with the program.

This means that also when not flying SAS, I will check if there’s a reasonably priced option with Star Alliance to get to my destination and only fly with someone else if there isn’t. As a result for being loyal to Star Alliance, I’ve been Eurobonus Gold for quite a while now.

Now where is the reward? There are 2 things that bother me a lot about this so called loyalty program. First of all, these miles don’t mean much. I wanted to go to NYC with my wife in August to celebrate our wedding anniversary. I got the miles so I started looking for Eurobonus available seats on flights to NYC (and back obviously). The trip would be for 5 days or so but there was some flexibility to it. Tough luck, it’s impossible to find 2 Eurobonus seats on any Star Alliance flight to NYC… and even if there were, chances that you would find seats for the flight back is pretty much non-existent… so much for being loyal.

The second part that bothers me is the lounge…” (I want to focus on the airmiles issue a bit more so read the rest of the rant here if you want).

Last week I thought I would give it another try. I called Eurobonus this time (as I gave up on the website already) and thought that maybe they could help me out finding suitable flights back and forth to NYC anytime between now and end of October. Also, it doesn’t really matter for us what day of the week we would leave nor what day to come back as long as we could spend about 4 days in New York. Is that flexible enough?

No luck. So it really wasn’t me unable to find something on their site, there really isn’t any ticket that I could get. Oh no, there was. I could fly over Stockholm, stay overnight there and then go to Newark… which was a bit far off for me honestly. Since the reason for this trip is our wedding anniversary I figured other locations might be good as well, we’d still be spending a few days away. Barcelona? Rome? London maybe? Etc etc… no sir, we can’t really find anything for 2 people. Now if you were to buy one, then we could most certainly book a second one using your miles. To which point I answered: “you’re a nice guy, but this Eurobonus program is pretty poor”. He did admit on the phone it is extremely hard to find 2 tickets on the same flight to many of the Star Alliance destinations.

Loyalty program? Are you kidding me! If loyalty means: if you have already flown a lot with us in the past AND if you are buying a new ticket now THEN we might be able to cut you a deal on yet another ticket IF that were for the same trip…. or something like that. If that’s what loyalty means, Eurobonus is the program to go with. In the meantime I’m wondering what I should do with my airmiles right now. Can I sell them? Do I really have to start all over again with another miles program… which might not be better anyway? You tell me…