Rewards of privilege for loyalty

Comfort or no travel

For some, travel can be quite stressful, and I can understand how that can happen. When I decide to leave my home on a journey, the needs for comfort and ease are paramount in my mind. The journey is as important as the destination and the purpose of the journey, there is no point in leaving home if part of that experience presents distress, discomfort, or suffering.

Having been a keen traveller for decades, I have stuck with certain brands and built a kind of loyalty account with them that has benefits. Things like priority check-in, for instance, mean I do not have to languish in long queues, fast-tracking through security or passport control, or cooling off in the lounge, which suggests one is relaxed long before boarding the flight.

In praise of loyalty schemes

There are indeed more affordable options for booking flights or hotels, but you do not get to build a customer profile that earns loyalty bonuses in the long term. I have booked accommodation with hotels.com for almost 10 years. For every 10 nights booked, you get a reward stamp equivalent to the average cost of those nights to offset the cost of a future booking. I have redeemed over 50 nights and have over 10 in hand.

This has saved me over £1,500 in accommodation costs. Sometimes, a very expensive room in the high season is halved in cost using a reward night.

Obviously, loyalty schemes are not for everyone, but if you do something often enough, it might well make sense to enter their loyalty scheme if they have one. I have flown KLM + AirFrance for about 20 years, and the frequency of my travel has earned me a platinum card that opens doors of privilege that I use well.

Unexpected platinum rewards

The price of loyalty

As a frequent traveller, I have learnt to appreciate comfort and as a creature of habit, the renewed experience of modes of travel, places of accommodation or refreshment, and services that make for the enjoyment of home away from home inadvertently enrols you into loyalty schemes.

In a bygone age, I had memberships of too many kinds of loyalty scheme, store cards, credit cards, train cards, hotel chain cards, airline loyalty schemes and obscure services that were more spam generators than you could care to be distracted by.

With time, I learnt to retain the ones with value and discard others whilst consolidating my activities with broader service providers than individual and discrete offerings.

Staying for free

When it comes to accommodation, I have kept with hotels.com and only use bookings.com if I cannot find accommodation or a good deal. For every 10 nights booked on hotels.com, I get a reward night the equivalent to the average price of the 10 nights I paid for. In six years, I have collected 52 reward nights and redeemed 40 of them saving me about £2,500 in hotel costs.

When I lived in The Netherlands for almost 13 years, KLM, then the 2003 merger Air France – KLM was my choice of airline apart from when I went on package holidays. On moving back to the UK, retaining that service has meant a stopover in either Amsterdam or Paris, a little inconvenience, but it is an outsized contribution to my loyalty points.

Platinum-plated reward

Having acquired enough Airmiles to reach Platinum last year, I was on my return from South Africa in January 55 points short of retaining my Platinum status. It would have required at least 2 business class return flights within mainland Europe to remain level par by the end of May.

I remember, just 3 years ago, I was only 30 points short of Platinum moving up from Gold, but never go to make it up. The Airmiles programme is called Flying Blue and though we get miles for distance travelled in relation to the class of travel, the measurement for traversing statuses which were based on the number of flights has changed to XP or eXperience Points.

So, imagine my glee when because of the Coronavirus pandemic I received an email from the Flying Blue programme that the XP threshold required to maintain our status by the end of the qualifying period had been reduced by 25%. As my qualifying period runs until the end of May, my already earned XP was enough to retain Platinum. [Flying Blue]

Thank you!

Opinion: I'll rather have a smug pilot

The NewYorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank

Catching up on The Week

By coincidence, I was on a flight back from Frankfurt when I encountered the above cartoon in an outdated copy of my subscription to The Week magazine. I am probably 6 to 8 weeks behind and I doubt if I’ll eventually catch up with the issues I have missed.

The Week is both an aggregator of the best news stories globally with sections that offer contemporary analysis issues and events, social, political, economic, scientific and about life in general. I will sometimes have The Week lead me to do more research on topics I have been introduced to. The Week has become my preferred magazine subscription.

The point the cartoon makes is succinct and deep; when taken in the context of the political earthquakes of rejected orthodoxy in #Brexit, referendums in Columbia, Italy and Hungary, the election of Donald Trump in the United States of America, it can only be concluded that we live in fearfully interesting times.

Chuck the pilot for a tyro

Now, to imagine that someone rather than a competent, well-trained pilot with the necessary qualifications, essential sobriety, and the presence of mind was at the controls of the flight I took from Frankfurt to Manchester is at best scary and with the knowledge, bordering on the suicidal.

Then to think, in having an unqualified pilot volunteer to take the controls just as all the other passengers' vote to jettison the qualified one just because they feel they have been ignored, disrespected, thought little of or just out of unfounded dislike. No, it does not bear thinking of.

Yet, that is what we did in 2016, the situation exemplified in the statement of Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary when he said, “People in this country have had enough of experts.”

The function of the expert

Now, experts are supposed to have the full knowledge and experience in their areas of expertise. However, being an expert does not make you perfect, even with all the data to hand, there might be variables completely outside the control of the expert to be able to give a definitive statement that represents the outcome that eventually is experienced.

However, the expert is not only necessary, they are also important to the decision-making process especially when met with a crisis that would call on experience to resolve. An expert as a pilot knowing how to land a plane if an engine is lost or the landing gear does not deploy. The expert as a consultant that told me that they knew how to treat my cancer, but the variable outside their control was my physiology, that alone could determine if I survived or died within 5 weeks.

The experts that were thought little of by Michael Gove were the economists who thought post-Brexit Britain would be disastrous. Whilst things have not turned out so bad, things are less than perfect, in fact, everything is in flux with the pound scraping the bottom of the barrel in the foreign exchange markets. Once Brexit is triggered the uncertainty might lead to other unintended shocks to the economy, no one can say, but the experts are there at least to give some guidance.

Taking offence at smug pilots

The other narrative of the ‘smug pilot’ is an aversion to fact, truth, knowledge, and expertise. The tendency not to need to verify anything before it is accepted and relayed as the truth it is not. There was a lot of that during the referendum campaign in the UK and quite a good deal of that in this cycle of the US presidential campaign.

Basically, Donald Trump got away with murder literally and Hillary Clinton could not get away with a mere email scandal, the end result would be an interesting 2017 where a man who has never ever held elective office, whose antecedents in business leaves much to be desired, with such thin skin, given to slights and vituperation, lacking in decorum and class would now assume the mantle of the leader of the free world.

Democracy’s suicide pact

Like the man in the cartoon says, “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” A man with no verifiable experience apart from the willingness to take a risk that could lead to the loss of souls along with the plane has just been voted in to fly the plane. You wonder if everyone who raised their hands in that plane thought of the possible consequences of their collective votes.

Maybe, they were on a suicide mission just because they have taken umbrage at ‘smug pilots that have lost touch with regular passengers like them’, that is where we are with the democracy we have played in 2016, if we do not crash land with the loss of all souls in a major air disaster, we might just count ourselves lucky.

I’ll rather have a smug pilot at the helm of the plane than someone who makes me feel special, but knows nothing about how to fly a plane.

Dublin: A Wedding Invitation

An invitation

Almost two months ago I was intimated with the plans for a wedding and at the same time invited. I accepted the invitation, noting the date and kept it at the back of my mind.

Then a month ago, we had another conversation where I got a better idea of the plans and at that time I decided to book both my flight and hotel as we were chatting.

Now, I have to be quite attentive to my booking regime because I cannot count the number of times I have had a hotel and flight booking mismatch or just got my return dates wrong because of the way calendar months are presented when booking.

At times, I’ll spend extra to have the option to review, reschedule, rebook or cancel, and that came in handy for when I booked my hotel.

Irelands

I have never been to Ireland, in fact, I have never been to any of the Irelands, those being Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

However, I do remember when I was about to be sent to solve a problem in Belfast in the 1990s and I just refused to go. The office was above a police station and this was during the troubles.

I said to them, there are places where being in close proximity to a police station would present a sense of safety, but I was not going to risk that in Belfast. No sooner had I refused to travel to Belfast did I experience the IRA bombing in Manchester where not even 10 yards from where I stood, shards of glass fell on a man. Those were crazy times.

Last year when I was working in North Wales, I could have taken the opportunity to travel from Holyhead to Dublin by ferry, I considered it many times but never found time to plan it. Dublin, here I come.

Eerie bookings

I booked my hotel, it looked like a bargain; in the centre of town and easy to get around until I had another look at the map and saw it backed unto a garden of remembrance.

Memorials are great and I celebrate them, but I know how my imagination can run away with such vividness that I could begin to see things. There are some things I do not want to see either by error or by commission; that realisation had me cancelling that booking almost before the confirmation email settled in my email inbox. Good thing I chose the cancellation option.

Besides, I need to follow my deepest premonitions more, because there have been times when something has suggested I take a particular action that later on I regret I have not done. Yet, I cannot beat myself up, I just hope that next time I am more sensitive.

Listlessly wireless

My usual booking site did not present any betters deals for the weekend I wanted to visit Dublin, so I tried LateRooms and that came up with a really good deal, I stayed at Wynn’s Hotel for 3 nights, the staff were friendly, the room was good, though the complimentary wireless internet service almost left me wanting to do the unconventional.

In the end, it was 3 nights in Dublin, but I must return because I did not get to see much of this amazing city which at only time in its history was second only to London in the British Isles.

Flight from fright

There are two airlines I would not board if they were the last escape from a dying earth, EasyJet and RyanAir, they have both for the no-frills and cheap flights they offer to places that would never appear on a decent map of civilisation taken the fun out of flying and in the process dragged everyone else down with them.

Gone are the days when not even 20 years ago you got a decent silver service for an hour’s flight in economy class. Now, one just makes do with a drink and sometimes you have to pay for that drink.

I’ll rather have stop-overs than take a direct flight, thankfully, Aer Lingus flies direct to Dublin from Manchester, though when I departed on Thursday evening, my flight lingered in late and left 45 minutes behind schedule.

The service was good enough and as I await boarding for my return to Manchester, the experience has been fun.

Anonymously queuing for a flight in Nigeria

Invisible inkspots

Sometimes, I wonder about the anonymous unidentified commenting audience (UCA) that leave comments on my blog.

If anyone would take time to leave a comment, it surprises me that they cannot be bothered to leave a name, probably a link to their blog and maybe an email address.

Obviously, it is an easy thing to trace the IP address, but that is just a lot of hassle, in the end, you have so many “anonymice”, gnawing at your cheese and leaving foul droppings, but worse still, you cannot address a faceless voice or a bodiless spirit the appropriate way.

However, sometimes a UCA comes along and writes something useful, and I have sung many a church hymn attributed to Anon – it would be a whole lot more meaningful if one were also to know who received inspiration to pen such a song of praise and worship.

It is, no doubt, the prerogative of the UCA to have no identity but really, if you must write, underwrite your opinion with an identity.

A comment to publish

A comment was left by a UCA and I could not leave it hidden in the comment areas because after reading the comments I really could not imagine going through such an ordeal – it is probably as true as any experience, I dread the thought entirely.

My commentary would appear in braces {}

Here goes …

Ah, life in the civilised world … Bless!. {I suppose this means service is a product of civilisation.}

I hope you have not been away from Nigeria too long to have lost the irony of today's ranting post! {I’ll be telling, won’t I?}

"On any given day, I’ll rather have the service I paid for than the compensation and if you must compensate it should be for the inconvenience I have suffered with my qualified input into the negotiations and an act of genuine contrition, feel some pain and make me happy" {I feel no different about this anywhere I may be, whether I would get redress is a different matter.}

1. Duh!

2. Get the service you pay for? (My generator just went on, NEPA just took light {Nigerian euphemism for a power cut}, we paid our bill on Tuesday)

3. Compensation, adequate or not? HA! HA! HA!

In our part of the world, honey … shit happens. We ask why, but we don't get answers, let alone informative ones ("Your train is delayed because …"), and while you're here complaining, have a coffee on us. {That is one way to look at it – have a coffee on us, I think I have lived a too sheltered life.}

Trying to board a plane in Nigeria

In Nigeria, the scenario would have played like this: First, it'd be the airport. No railway system. {The Chinese are working in rebuilding our railway infrastructure; I once travelled from Jos to Ibadan on the trains in 1973.} Second, your flight would have been delayed indefinitely. {When I last left Nigeria, my flight was delayed for 5 hours.}

Tickets for the said flight would still continue to be sold by the airline. Hours would roll by. You’d eventually get hungry and buy a meat-pie or a similarly yuckety yuck coffee.

Eventually, although there would have been no prior announcement, you'd notice a desperate line forming. You'd remain seated, confident that you had your boarding pass and seat # in your pocket, although this being Nigeria, you'd double check. {Announcements I have heard in Lagos airports are too RP to be English, I find them comical.}

You'd look at your watch, stretch out your legs, decide there was no point taking your newspaper with you as you'd read it 3 times over already, pick up your jacket and laptop, and walk unhurriedly to the line, really, just to get a feel of what was going on. {I feel pain already.}

Your irritation to find your plane was indeed being boarded (even though there'd been no announcement) would pass in a flash … you'd be relieved that at least the plane was leaving for its destination.

By the way, you'd have missed the meeting by now, but you had other things to do in the town, catch up with an old colleague, visit a bookstore for a particular book …

Anyway, being 6 ft tall, easily 3 inches above everybody else, you would see that there were - Oh! about 30 people ahead of you, but no problem, right? {This is beginning to scare me.}

You'd pat your shirt pocket to feel your ticket and boarding pass, just to reassure yourself -- a bit like when you were little and carried the dog eared pocket sized stuffed monkey Curious George everywhere you went.

You'd notice a curious thing, the airline attendant, seeming to count heads. 'Ey, 'ey, what's this?' could she be counting heads to fill the seats, regardless of whether one has a boarding pass or not? She couldn't, could she?

Suddenly, you are no longer so confident. You wish, grown-up man that you are, Curious George was there to make you feel better. But he's not, and you are grown-up, so instead, you loosen your tie a bit and keep moving in the line.

Ah, the attendant is walking towards you. Phew, you are one of the lucky ones; you will get on the flight. But, 'ey 'ey, what’s this? She’s stopped counting 2 people ahead of you …"The plane is full", she announces. {Surely, not if you were travelling Business Class.}

"The rest of you will take the next flight". Incredulous, and in an adrenaline rush, you rudely push past her, rush through the metal detector, run out on to the tarmac - this is Nigeria, after all, although it could be Gatwick), ignoring shouts of "Sah, Sah!". {This is beyond me, I hope not.}

You rush to the plane steps and find yourself pleading with the airline official to let you get on the flight. He looks at your face. You are tired and hungry and goddamit, desperate.

'Alright sir, welcome aboard'. You say thanks, and are annoyed with yourself for seeming so grateful. You do, after all, have a boarding pass in your pocket. {This must be fictional, it really must be, I do not think I can countenance this kind of situation, probably best to stay away from Nigeria for a while longer.}

Thanks to Anonymous. - With a capital A, I stand corrected Anonywho.