March 4, 2008
Air miles - legitimate booty?
Should government employees and politicians be allowed to keep the air miles they accrue on official business? No, roar the public-spending puritans. But if they aren’t allowed to keep them, why should business people be allowed to hang on to theirs? Don’t they belong to the shareholders who funded their travel in the first place? Couldn’t they at least be used to fund other corporate travel?
Michael Skapinker probes these ethical questions in today’s FT, concluding that it is a puzzle why people get so exercised by air miles when they are so difficult to use. But I have my own suggestion to add: companies could distribute the air miles accrued by their workers to those small shareholders who bother to show up to their annual meetings.
Given that most of these investors are retired, they have plenty of time on their hands to find ways of actually using the blasted things. And it would be a great spur for shareholder democracy.
Confiscating air miles won’t benefit companies - because in the long run, it will cause the air mile programmes to be shut down. Here’s why…
The reason airlines use airmiles programmes is as a loyalty tool. If you force the recipient of the airmiles to give up the miles (whether to their company/ministry to reduce the cost of their next flight or to shareholders) the recipient loses their loyalty to that airline and in future will simply book the airline with the cheapest flight or best service on the relevant route.
This would make the airmiles programmes useless to the airlines - what’s the point of a loyalty programme that doesn’t generate loyalty? So they’d withdraw the programmes. Which would, of course take the companies back to square one. No air miles = no cheaper flights for the firm.
So why expend time and money and piss off your employees, if you won’t see any financial benefit except in the very short-term?
Posted by: Robbie | March 4th, 2008 at 3:50 pm | Report this comment