The Smartest People in Points Now Work for Them, Basic Business Spreads & a Huge 125K Offer!

**Shawn Coomer** (0:00)
A great deal for InKind, Flying Blue is changing everything, and Rakuten, those cool card offers are back. All of that and more coming up right now on MTM Travel.

**Mark Ostermann** (0:10)
Plus talking about our Tiffany Funk problem.

**Shawn Coomer** (0:23)
So happy Thursday everyone. And should we talk about Flying Blue, Mark, with our Tiffany Funk problem? We never covered this on the show, but Tiffany Funk of One Mile at a Time fame, but also starting Point.me, partner at Points Pros, a true legend in this industry and on this side of the industry, took over Flying Blue. She's the head of Flying Blue. What did this happen, like a month or two ago?

**Mark Ostermann** (0:45)
Yeah, I think it was announced a few months ago. I don't know when she actually took over the role, but it's been kind of recent. And then the first thing that we see, I don't know if this was already in place before she went over there, or if this was kind of like the first hurrah of her being a key player in their loyalty program.
But this is like the first thing that's come out since. And we've seen this, you know, Richard Currie built Gilbert Ott from God Save the Points, is the head of loyalty at One World Alliance. And so we've seen them kind of take our brighter minds and say, all right, how do we work within this? And I think there's some good to that. There's some bad to that. The good is that they want to have a program that people can understand and use, and that's useful to them. But they also understand how our brains work, and they can know where they can tweak things and still, you know, make it worthwhile to us. And we talked about this with the Atmos Summit card, where they are like, hey, we created this problem where we charge you when you book a partner award, but this new card fixes that problem, gives you the credit back, so you don't have to pay it. So if you sign up for this, and this is kind of the similar with Flying Blue, like, hey, we're going to make this less valuable unless you chase our status. And we're seeing more and more of these banks and these loyalty programs figure out ways to create a problem and then give you the means to fix that problem, but you're going to have to do it through spending or using their program. And I think that that's just going to get more and more as we see more of those minds work in that environment.

**Shawn Coomer** (2:18)
They're using the best of us against us. What does that say about us that we're still here doing the show, and all these fancy people have...

**Mark Ostermann** (2:25)
We're not tell-offs.

**Shawn Coomer** (2:28)
No, I mean, she is a great mind, one of the best in the space, and somebody who is of the highest quality, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. I just really enjoy Tiffany, but she has to do a job, right? And the industry is what the industry is. And what they are doing, to your point, is they are sort of taking what we have on the paid side and putting it to award tickets.
And so, for example, on the cheapest business class awards, under this new scheme, which starts next month, that we're decoupling things like lounge access. And seat assignments, I think, were already decoupled, but I always thought that was cheap when you don't get a seat assignment on a business class seat. But basically, the idea of basic economy, a regular ticket, a more flexible ticket, they have that already on also with business class on the paid side. We're now getting it on awards. We've seen this with more airlines. And it just means that yesterday's business class award is going to cost more tomorrow and it's going to come with less.

**Mark Ostermann** (3:27)
We saw this goes all the way back to basic economy when it first came out. And they were like, oh, we're doing this to fight with the low cost carriers. Well, that basic economy ticket was never as cheap as low cost carriers. It was a way just bake in, charging you more to get the perks that you automatically got from buying the flight, like picking your seat, having luggage, things like that. So if the flight used to be $250 for that ticket, they just made basic economy $250.
And then you had to pay more to get the other perks. But they try to sell it as, hey, this is a way that if you don't want all those perks, you can pay less. No, you're paying the same. You're just not getting them anymore. So that's the way. And maybe the prices would have gone up anyway. So this is a way for them to say that the prices aren't going up. That could be the case too. But it's just kind of a shame to see. And you look at it like we're talking about, the basic economy is the old 60K saver award for business class to and from Europe. And now it's 75K if you want lounge access and things like that.