Many highly-coveted airline perks such as free bags, priority boarding, and club lounge access, can now be obtained by carrying an airline’s co-branded credit card. In fact — some airline credit cards allow you to earn elite VIP status simply by spending on the card.
The trend of extending these valued benefits to co-brand cardholders, together with recent program changes at the world’s largest frequent flyer programs (FFPs), have left many frequent bum-in-seat business travelers wondering if the airlines still care about them earning benefits the hard way.
I asked Mike Hecht, Delta’s General Manager of Co-Brand Strategy about this at the Mega Loyalty Conference in San Diego.
He revealed that Delta don’t mind whether their customers are loyal by way of credit card spend, or from actual bum-in-seat flying — either way they’re being loyal and should be rewarded with status.
In comparison — JetBlue’s Manager of TrueBlue Partnerships, Whitnee Hawthorne, said that they would prefer customers to be loyal by both flying, and by engaging with co-brand products.
To those who thought that frequent flyer programs were all about encouraging airline loyalty — giving an airline a greater share of your business, flying more often and spending more — the idea that use of a…
