When I saw this press release come out from AirTran last week, I laughed out loud. The airline is offering 32 A+ credits (good for two roundtrips) in exchange for a donation of 50,000 Midwest miles (good for two roundtrips at the lowest redemption level) to charity using Midwest’s “Miracle Miles” promotion. 64 will be given for 100,000 miles. The donation must be made by June 15. While the promotion has already been covered here on BoardingArea, I wanted to share some of my thoughts.
AirTran has become a large player in Milwaukee fairly quickly, thanks to the new competition they’ve added on there. But just adding extra passengers through low fares is not the best profitability-wise. So here we see AirTran making a move to attract the loyal, frequent business travelers over at Midwest. And having those travelers forfeit their Midwest miles only makes the pot sweeter. On the more traditional side, AirTran is also offering status matches to any Midwest elites.
Anyway, an interesting, hilarious, and aggressive move. Also, on a side note, AirTran is still partners with Frontier, the brand that is replacing Midwest. Yeah, awkward.
To be accurate, 32 credits = 4 one-way/2 round-trip tickets.
http://www.aplusrewards.com/earn_and_redeem.aspx
Well… AirTran isn’t partners with Frontier anymore – you probably wrote this before word got out.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/frontier-airlines-ends-partnership-with-airtran-airways-2010-05-17?reflink=MW_news_stmp
@DGS – Thanks for correcting me. The post has now been fixed.
@Jon – This had been suspected for awhile, but yes, the news release came out a few hours after I had posted this.