I don’t care about your company policies & structure, hope you understand

This seems to be a difficult hurdle for airline companies. Since the Conversation Manager came out, I actually became a more frequent flyer. I was looking forward to the benefits, you can imagine. Last week, I had enough points to grand myself an upgrade on a long distance flight. To be honest, I was looking forward to this privilege 🙂

The moment I called the airline, apparently, the ticket that I bought was not expensive enough to get an upgrade. Because my loyalty card was issued by Lufthansa and now I am flying with United Airlines, they cannot fulfill their promise. So, no upgrade for Steven. And you know, I will survive. But I lost my faith in the honesty behind these loyalty programs like Miles and more. During my call, they explained me their company structure and the reason why they could not give me what they promise on their website. But I don’t really care about the structure and organization about those airlines, I trusted the information on their websites.

My mistake… A good word in this story for the people of Brussels Airlines: when they noticed my tweet about this story, they reacted right away. The moment I told them I was flying United, their answer was: ‘there is nothing we can do then, but enjoy your flight’. If there is nothing you can do when you share the same loyalty program, there might be something wrong with the structure of this whole program.

Loyalty programs only work if clients can see and feel the advantage of the benefits you promise. Again a situation of managing expectations & clear/open forms of communication.