Analysis of Jet Privilege partner redemption changes - Part 1

Earlier today, I wrote what I considered breaking news, about Jet Privilege changing the miles requirements for partner airline award tickets. Partner airlines have been a pretty efficient, though underused, source of award tickets. So when the changes were announced earlier today, I considered (and still do) these changes as representing a devaluation of JP miles, though its effect is not likely to be much in my personal view. Having said that, some of the changes are critical, and so I've put together this rather long post, analysing the changes in detail.

This is a series in 4 parts, indexed as follows:

Announcement and the changes to partner awards requirements

Preliminary analysis of the changes

Specific changes, good routes under the new chart, etc

Workarounds and hacks

Zoning changes

Firstly, origin and destination cities have been grouped under 13 different zones, compared to 23 zones that were there before.

The previous zoning system was extremely unwieldy to use, considering you were looking at a 23x23 matrix! 

They've grouped a lot of the zones together, which makes great sense. So, you no longer have separate categories such as Eastern Europe, Europe hubs, Western Europe, South Africa 1 and 2, etc. Also, the Americas region has been classified into 5 zones from 9, one single zone for the middle east, and so on. 

Mileage changes for flights between zones

Consequent to the revision, there is a more streamlined mileage requirement across zones. Naturally, this is the biggest change, so we will be analysing the specific changes in detail, in subsequent posts.

The following is the new redemption chart. Miles required are for one-way economy awards. 

Return tickets will cost 2x of the one-way cost, business class will be 2x of the economy class requirement, and first class will be 3x of the economy class requirement.

Etihad business class

Sure, this results in some inefficiencies with redemptions, but you win some, lose some. We will get to that analysis separately.

Some sweet spots gone

There were some amazing sweet spots in the partner redemptions structure, including some intra-US routes. For instance, may spots within the new Zone 9 were earlier available at just 2,500 miles one way in economy class. Also, in general, intra-zone routes in some cases gave exceptional value, because of what I'd call improper grouping of cities within a zone. All of those will be gone in the new construct.

Stopovers

It was not clear in the previous construct, as to whether stopovers were not allowed. Hearsay suggests that some agents permitted ticketing with a stopover, while others didn't (though I find that hard to believe...I imagine none of them would have permitted a stopover). Now, although they have not specifically spoken about stopovers, it has now been clarified that a transfer / connection time of up to 24 hours will not be ticketed as travels between separate sets of zones. However, if the transfer / connection time is more than 24 hours, then the pricing is for 2 separate zones. For example: If you flew BLR-MNL via HKG on Cathay Pacific, that would count as 

• Zone 4 to Zone 3 normally, if the stopover in HKG is less than 24 hours, costing you 32,000 miles.
• Zone 4 to Zone 2, plus Zone 2 to Zone 3, if the stopover in HKG is more than 24 hours, costing you 56,000 miles.

Some destinations have completely disappeared from the chart

Some destinations that were available earlier (under the larger zoning construct) are no longer available. Striking examples include the entire Caribbean area, Taiwan, and South Pacific. 

The previous zoning chart, from which several destinations seem to have been dropped

Also many specific destinations within zones that remain have been omitted. For instance, while there's a Zone called the Middle East, it only comprises UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Does that mean that Bahrain, Doha, etc are not available on partner airlines any more? Similarly, the Europe Zone excludes some prominent countries and cities. I doubt that these are actually not available, and I'd like to believe that this is just an unintentional omission which will be rectified soon.

Pro-tip

As I mentioned in my previous post of the day, these changes take effect for requests received starting 1 April 2016. I think it is mighty generous of Jet to give more than a month's notice of changes, considering how easily they could have slipped it in without information, like many others have done in the past. The other good thing is that this date of 1 April 2016 is for receiving requests, which 

• need to be at least 14 days prior to travel (which means you've already got 14 days extra to work with),
• is not a cutoff for ticketing (which could take anything between 2 and 14 days after the request is received by Jet Privilege),
• nor is it a cutoff for the travel date (which could go up to a month from the ticketing date. I say a month, because historically, JP has claimed not having partner award visibility beyond that period).

Working with the above, you could potentially send in a partner award request on 31 March 2016, for travel sometime between the beginning and the middle of May 2016. That's quite an advance notice period!

Updates

More information will likely emerge in due course, and this post (and others in this series) will be updated to incorporate those changes as well. So keep checking here! You can also refer to the new chart, here.

Readers: Please do leave your comments and thoughts on these changes, below. What do you think they've handled well, and what could have been done differently?