Jet Privilege devalues by increasing mileage requirements for partner airline awards
Virtually everyone seems to be doing it, so Jet Privilege has joined in on the action. Effective 1 April 2016, you will need to redeem more miles for award tickets on Jet Airways partner airlines. Here's the quick dope, with detailed analysis to follow over the weekend.
This is a series in 4 parts, indexed as follows:
Starting 1 April 2016, Jet Privilege has increased the number of miles required for an award ticket on partner airlines. These new requirements will apply to partner awards that are requested for starting 1 April 2016. The new charts are here, but I've reproduced the key aspects below:
The zone division is as follows:
To cut a long story short, partner rewards will get more expensive. As a quick example, I take the case of India to London. Under the current requirements, this needs 31,000 JP miles. The new requirement for this route is 35,000 JP miles, which is a 14% increase. Other sectors are also similarly affected.
There is one clarification as well, which is that if a routing between Zone A and Zone B involves transiting through a third zone C, and the stopover is more than 24 hours in that zone, then the entire award is priced as awards between 2 separate sets of zones (A to B + B to C). However, if the stopover is less than 24 hours, it is priced as a direct routing between Zones A and B.
As part of my beginner's guide series, I'd written about redeeming JP miles for partner award tickets. As mentioned in that post, you need to send in your requests for partner redemptions, either online or over email. Since the new requirements apply for requests received on or after 1 April 2016, you need to ensure that you send in your requests on or before 31 March 2016, for award tickets on partner airlines. The travel date could be much further out (though my experience suggests that JP doesn't have partner award visibility more than a month or so out). The actual ticketing could take place later, and you'd still be in the money, as it were, by pricing the trip using the old award chart.
I'll do a detailed evaluation over the weekend, but in essence, this to me personally represents a small devaluation of JP miles, considering that partner awards are not as frequently used as awards on Jet Airways' own flights. To be sure, there are no changes to award mileage requirements on Jet Airways' flight.
Readers: What's your take on this devaluation? Will this now prompt you to advance (or trigger) partner awards redemptions?
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