About a week after the U.S. Department of Transportation launched a probe into U.S. airline loyalty programs, Air France-KLM's Flying Blue topped Point.me's inaugural global ranking of such programs.
Point.me is a real-time search and booking engine that helps customers compare and book flights with points, and it developed the rankings "to provide consumers transparency and greater confidence in earnings and redeeming points."
Point.me used quantitative and qualitative data, including contributions from 55 points and miles experts, to evaluate 62 worldwide airline loyalty programs as of Aug. 1, 2024, then computed a percentage score based on criteria including ease of earning miles, redemption rates, availability on partner airlines, ease (or difficulty) of booking award flights and other factors. The company selected frequent-flyer programs that are accessible to U.S.-based travelers.
"Getting real value from airline loyalty points is often significantly harder for passengers than it needs to be," Point.me CEO Adam Morvitz said in a statement. "These rankings draw on our team's collective travel expertise and deep data-led insight from our reward search engine."
The report is "independent and consumer focused," added Point.me co-founder and president Tiffany Funk during a Tuesday media briefing. "No program could pay to be included in this list. We wanted to provide that transparency and confidence in earning and redeeming points."
Air France-KLM's Flying Blue, landed in the top spot with a score of 93.06 percent out of 100 percent. Its key benefits were the ease of earning points through its "extensive partnerships" and its "great redemption rates."
"They partner with every financial institution in the U.S., [and] they partner with all of the global hotel programs," Funk said. "This is an unusual posturing for a European program, but they have really made the most of it and been very aggressive and assertive in terms of how they're expanding their customer base [and] how they are raising the profile of Air France and KLM through Flying Blue."
Coming in second was Air Canada's Aeroplan program at 77.43 percent. "Air Canada had the opportunity to completely rebuild their loyalty program from scratch in 2020, so it is the most modern of these programs and that is reflected in a lot of the benefits that they're offering to travelers," Funk said. "They've got tremendous availability on their partner airlines as part of Star Alliance, and they also have really interesting partnerships with airlines like Cathay Pacific, Etihad and Oman Air."
In third place was United Airlines' MileagePlus program at 72.22 percent. Its benefits included being competitive in many metrics and being "excellent for less-frequent flyers," Funk said.
Tied for fourth place were British Airways' Executive Club and Virgin Atlantic's Flying Club, each at 69.10 percent. "A big piece of that is both programs have implemented what they call a guaranteed seat availability, where they promised that on every flight where it says Virgin Atlantic on the outside of the plane or British Airways on the outside of the plane, they are ensuring a certain minimum number of seats are available for you to use with your points," Funk said.
Other U.S. carriers that made the global top 10 list include American Airlines' AAdvantage program in sixth with a score of 68.06 percent, Alaska Airlines' Mileage Plan in seventh at 65.97 percent, and JetBlue's TrueBlue program in ninth with a score of 61.81 percent.
With loyalty becoming more important than ever in corporate airline programs, even in contract negotiations, "its vitally important to have independent benchmarking of key traveler needs," Point.me director of partnerships Gilbert Ott told BTN via email.
"The Point.me Best Airline Rewards report illuminates the value of different airline rewards programs beyond the butt in seat benefits, including customer service levels, strategic airline partnerships outside of alliances and the relative value of earning rewards with a given airline versus another," Ott said. "These report features could serve as important tiebreakers in the decision-making process and provide new points of negotiation. This can also aid in helping corporate travel managers choose programs which their travelers find strong value in [outside] of work, increasing workplace satisfaction."