Everyone loves getting something for free - no matter what it costs!

Some loyalty programmes such as Voyager play on this irrational greed... but lets look at some hard figures:

The new Voyager Visa card offering is detailed in the Voyager newsletter dated Nov 06 - Jan 07.

The 'Classic' (read 'cheapest') card works as follows, ignoring the small extra benefit in the first year: You get 1 'mile' for every R12.50 spent. Once you get to 19 000 'miles', you get a free domestic flight. Except for the taxes, which you pay anyway. This means if you spend R237 500 on the credit card, you get one flight, such as Cape Town - Johannesburg, which can be purchased on the Internet for R984, made up of R600 airfare and R348 'taxes' (perhaps we'll look into those 'taxes' one day!). Let's not forget the R300 annual fee.

So in summary, you get product worth R300 (R600 - R300) for spending R237 500 - about 0.1%, one tenth of a percent! In other words, one Voyager mile is worth about 3c.

Imaging if a shop offered you a 0.1% discount - that's like paying R9.99 instead of R10! How much would you be prepard to do to secure this kind of discount?

This table summarises the benefits and costs to earn one Voyager domestic Cpt - Jnb flight:

This of course assumes you simply get given the product. But as most Voyager members know, sometimes actually using those free miles is not that simple. A host of restrictions apply, and it is often necessary to navigate an administraative nightmare to get the 'free' benefits Flights which are 'full' to Voyager mile travellers frequently have many empty seats. Also, in my experience at Cape Town International at least, some of the Voyager 'help' desk staff are carefully selected for their ability to radiate surly unresponsiveness.

The largest factor in sustaining the Voyager program is corporate travel - business travellers who do not pay for their own tickets. The company pays for the ticket, and the traveller collects the 0.1%. So to the traveller, this is money for nothing - albeit very small money. One wonders how many business flights would suddenly become unnecessary if this fell away!

One final point - the monetary value of a Voyager 'mile' is always carefully left unspecified. This leaves SAA free at any time to do some accounting juggling to reduce a liability in their books... like perhaps when the CEO is after a hefty share option bonus!

Admittedly this is not the full picture, as there are other benefits. But work out the actual value before jumping to any conclusions. Next perhaps we need to work out the actual effective percentage discount offered by Voyager when earning miles by travelling by plane. Any volunteers?

A short tale...

I happened to be in the Voyager office in Cape Town today (28 Nov 2006), and to while away the time while the Voyager staff member grappled with the complexities of an 'authorisation' versus a 'payment', I picked up a beautiful glossy booklet which promised to make everything clear about the Voyager program. Barely stifling my excitement, I quickly flipped to the page comparing the various types of Voyager card. The first line read as follows:
"Star Alliance Tier Mies exclusivity"
I asked the consutant what this means, and she replied '"I have no idea", but she would call someone over who was the expert. The expert dult arrived, and looked at the above line. She said that it shouldn't really be there, but she was also unsure what it meant, particularly the word 'exclusivity'.

When the Voyager experts at SA don't understand the voyager literature, that makes you think!

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