has any major airline bankruptcy negated its incentive points?

"nobody" <nobody@nobody.org> wrote in message
news:412105CB.D6205EF5@nobody.org...

> In the case of liquidation,( Such as Ansett, Sabena) I believe that
depending
> on jurisdiction, FF customers with banked points/miles would become
unsecured
> creditors, with some value accorded to each FF point they have. But they
have
> to wait in line (takes years) and will get only leftover crumbs (usually
> nothing) after the bankers/rats have taken all the remaining assets.

I have in "interesting" situation. As best as I can tell I have quite a few
miles on Continental. I have never flown Continental. The miles came from
Eastern when they had a combined frequent Flier program. In fact I vaguely
think some of them came from TWA through Eastern. I still get a statement
once a year and I really should enquire as to whether the miles really
exist.

The first time that Continental went bankrupt, they cancelled their
Travelbank frequent flyer program. I lost a modest number of miles in
that one. By the second time they went bankrupt, the FF program was
called Onepass, was merged with Eastern's, and had moved into the
holding company, so when they went ch 11 and Eastern went ch 7, the FF
miles survived. When Pan Am died, its FF miles for the most part were
transferred to Delta. Since then UA, US, and AC have gone bankrupt,
and in each case the FF miles continued.

FF programs are such an integral part of the industry now that I would
be very surprised if an airline cancelled its FF program other than if
the whole airline were liquidated, and (as with Pan Am) sometimes not
even then.

"John R. Levine" wrote:
> FF programs are such an integral part of the industry now that I would
> be very surprised if an airline cancelled its FF program other than if
> the whole airline were liquidated, and (as with Pan Am) sometimes not
> even then.

In a liquidation, it is possible that another airline got a good deal on the
purchase of the database of customers. This would result in a large percentage
of those customers moving to the new airline in order to preserve their points
and thus would give the new airline a lower cost of acquisition compared to if
another airline got its hands on that list.

Remember that in a liquidation, every secured creditor wants to sell as many
assets as possible to get as much money as possible from the liquidation. And
a database of customers is a valuable asset.

>In a liquidation, it is possible that another airline got a good deal on the
>purchase of the database of customers. This would result in a large percentage
>of those customers moving to the new airline in order to preserve their points
>and thus would give the new airline a lower cost of acquisition compared to if
>another airline got its hands on that list.

That's just what happened with Pan Am and Delta. At the time, Delta
was just starting to run international routes and this gave them a
quick base of int'l customers.