Star Alliance Issues

While travelers continue to prioritize finding cheap traveloptions, such as cheapairplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, discounttravel deals, cheapdeals, and cheap vacation packages,frequent fliers also tend to attempt to fly as much as possible on the sameairline, or partners of that airline, to maximize the value of their frequentflier miles.

Star Alliance is a leading global airline network, with thelargest number of member airlines, daily flights, destinations, and countriesreached. Established as the first reallyglobal airline alliance, it offers passengers convenient worldwide reach. Members include United, Lufthansa, AirCanada, and Air China.

Recently Star Alliance asked a focus group of travel expertsto compile a list of complaints about its 27 collective airlines. The following were the complaints that stoodout as things that Star Alliance really needs to work on, according to BradCohen:

• Inconsistencyand elitism abound between Alliance members with variations in everything fromelite bonuses to upgrades to mileage and annual spend required to earn elitestatus. Some airline members believethat they are better than others. Forexample, while anyone flying first class on a Star Alliance airline is supposedto be able to go to any partner first class lounge, that it not true for selectLufthansa, Singapore, Swiss, Singapore and Thai first class lounges. Passengers have observed that they cannotchoose their seats on Lufthansa flights when flying on United miles, despite itbeing a Star Alliance Gold member.

• Gainingelite status is growing harder now that United is the only remaining Americanairline in the Star Alliance. Makingthings even more difficult is Uniteds transition to a revenue based earningprogram, resulting in fliers earning miles based on how much they spend insteadof how many miles they fly. United hasalso massively increased the amount fliers would need to spend in order to earnelite status.

• To makematters even worse, United recently decided to make it even more difficult toearn miles that qualify for elite status by requiring fliers to reserve flightson Uniteds website vs. a partner website or a third party booking site inorder to earn full miles. This actionpotentially costs clients a lot more money. Devaluing mileage earning rates on partner airlines appearscontradictory to the entire idea of an Alliance.

• It is increasinglydifficult to earn miles via Uniteds new revenue based program especially forthose without existing elite status or with lower level status. In most cases fliers will earn fewer, oftenfar less, from a flight in the new system than they would in the old system,which was solely based on the number of actual miles flown.

• Unitedis taking care of its most elite passengers, at the expense of itsnon-elite. The number of miles fliersearn is not only based on how much they spend, but on what their status levelis. For example, someone without statuswill earn 5 miles per dollar spent, while on the high end, a premier memberwill earn 11 miles per dollar spent.

• Mileredemption is becoming more difficult because many of the airlines in the starAlliance appear reluctant to release award space to one another, or at leastthey do not always make award seats available on each others websites. An examples of this is even when certain partner flights are availableusing United miles, they do not show up on the United website.

• Ghostawards are further frustrating customers. This happens when award seats on partner airlines appear available onaward searches, but are not actually bookable using partner miles.