Open letter to Calin Rovinescu, CEO of Air Canada
Dear Calin, I'm leaving you.
This is not about you, it's about... well ok, it is totally about you, and Air Canada's lack of attention to its loyal customers. There is a lesson buried in here somewhere for one of us.
I was a loyal Air Canada customer for 9 years and most of that time I was either a Platinum or Gold elite traveler. That means I flew between 50,000 and 100,000 miles a year on Air Canada planes or their partner airlines. Extrapolating the $460 YYC to YYZ fare and the 1660 miles between them, my loyalty meant a typical revenue of $14,000 to $28,000 a year to Air Canada. It may be good to keep that number in mind.
One of the reasons frequent fliers like myself tend to stick with one particular airline is for the rewards. Those rewards can add up to mean free or discounted flights, upgrades to First or Business class, boarding ahead of others and other perks. Air Canada was not the only membership I had, but it was the one I chose to focus my travel on because they are Canadian and they originally had a great rewards program. But then something changed.
Actually, a number of things changed and none of them were good. A few years ago
ownership of the rewards plan shifted and it became even more detached from the airline than it was before. It became harder to book reward flights and more painful to collect the benefits once you earned them. Amid the confusion of dual internal reward programs (
Altitude and
Aeroplan), the new program became so convoluted that it was incomprehensible. When you finally weeded through all the numbers it became very clear that it was now extremely hard to earn rewards, and once you had them, it was nearly impossible to redeem them. The program had become worthless to me.
I started looking for an alternative and as it turns out a few of my friends had already blazed a trail for me to follow. The path I chose was through the
Delta Medallion program. They just happened to have a challenge available that I took up and found that my regular travel schedule would get me to Gold level in only a few weeks. However, Gold means something different to Delta than I was used to. It means a level of acknowledgment I was not accustomed to and complimentary upgrade options on every flight. In my first 25 flights with Delta, I was upgraded 23 times to Business class.
Let me share how many times Air Canada gave me complimentary upgrades to First in the nine years I was loyal to that airline. Zero. Nada. None.
In addition to the nice instant perk of complimentary upgrades, the connected partner programs are more appealing and better connected. My hotel, rental car, limo service, and other travel needs are all connected automatically to their system.
Oh, and they actually say "Thank You" for being a SkyMiles Medallion member. It may sound like a minor thing to say "Thank You" but it is important. That personal touch is lacking in the Air Canada world and for an understandable reason - the rewards program is completely detached from the actual Airline.
I get it, I really do, and I am not really sure how you motivate the Airline to provide better perks for a rewards program that has no real connection to it. The most obvious suggestion is that Air Canada needs to take back it's rewarding program and actually own it. You have lost me for now, but I would come back if the program got better and actually had some relevance to the Airline and the money I put into it. If the airline ever takes back control of their rewards program, let me know and I will consider coming back. For now, I have a flight to catch - oh look, I've been upgraded.
