Questions and Answers

Emirates has been running their Jennifer Aniston ads featuring the 380 F shower and bar a lot recently, at least in the NYC market. Has anyone besides me wondered what their strategy is? Are they trying to sell F revenue tickets? Even in NY there can’t be that many folks able and willing to pay those prices. Are they trying to advance the brand by creating an expectation of opulence and luxury? Won’t they risk disappointed Y customers who learn those amenities aren’t available to them? Are they simply encouraging more aspirational award redemptions? I doubt it. Does anyone have an insight?

I asked this question a month and a half ago with no responses. I am wondering what you all think now, in retrospect?

[USER=1579]@Babydoc[/USER] – I think the ads were Emirates trying to sell those seats. [U][URL=’http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2016/04/01/bloggers-ruining-deals/’]As Lucky said in his post this morning[/URL][/U], Emirates was not happy with the number of customers flying their F product using AS miles. They didn’t make near the revenue on those seats that they do on cash seats. I don’t know enough about revenue management to know how many seats they were actually making a profit on but there will be a lot few seats sold using AS miles, that’s for sure.

It also gets you thinking about Emirates in general, whether you’re buying J F or Y tickets. Someone may think that since their F product is so over the top, their J and Y cabins cant be totally horrible, compared to other carriers.

I agree with [USER=29]@David W[/USER]. I doubt any reasonable person would expect the seats that Jennifer Aniston was shown sleeping in or shower access on a Y ticket. The objective is more to differentiate the brand from other airlines and create a halo effect for the other classes of service (which we know are nothing exceptional).

This whole situation has been nothing more than an awfully conceived and executed business decision. As has been discussed the award prices were not significantly underpriced in many cases. If Emirates felt that too many people were flying for miles they could just restrict award inventory. Too few seats for their own members? Allow skywards members to access space not available to partners (plenty of airlines do this). Even if it was absolutely necessary to raise redemption levels there was no need to bring down the decision overnight after three years of historical data. It’s not like the realization that people like using Alaska miles to book EK came to them overnight. Giving people some lead time would have made all the difference in the world. The fact that AS change rules are significantly different from AA would have prevented a deluge of speculative bookings.