Travel Tips For Airline Mergers

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Lose Your Business Card

Frequent fliers often laminate their business card into a luggage tag and then attach it to their checked bags. Lose that habit immediately. When things get ugly in post-merger-announcement labor negotiations, disgruntled luggage handlers have been known to slice off the business cards and routing tags and send your bags to oblivion. Why target business bags? The luggage guys know that those bags probably belong to high-yield, high-profit customers, the ones most likely to complain to airline management about their treatment. Whether the tactic works as a negotiating ploy is questionable, but the effect on your luggage is undeniable.

Drain Your Mileage Accounts

I’ve never been a fan of “banking miles” in your frequent-flyer program accounts, but a merger environment should convince you not to leave any unclaimed awards on the table. As the six carriers contract, they will merge their programs too. That will reduce competition among the frequency plans and allow surviving carriers to increase the number of miles you need to claim a free seat. We may not know which airlines will be merging, but we can safely assume that a mile next year will be worth less than it is now.

Keep Pursuing Elite Status

On the flip side, it’s probably wise to continue pursuing elite status with your current carriers. For one thing, if you reach the required status levels during 2008, you’re credentials and benefits kick in immediately. And the status you accrue for 2009 isn’t likely to be revoked after any merger. In fact, airlines that merge generally go out of their corporate way to appeal to their existing elite fliers. Mergers may decrease the value of the status in the coming years, but elite fliers always do better than run-of-the-mill travelers.

Be Wary of Interim Partnerships

When airlines announce a merger, they often try to mitigate the long legal- and political-vetting processes with interim marketing partnerships on routes, reservations, and other procedures. The goal, of course, is to make the merger seem real, long before it has been approved. The problem is that very few employees at the not-yet-merged carriers seem to get the memo. So don’t put any faith in the partnerships announced in the interregnum. Continue to deal with each airline directly rather than relying on the inter-carrier marketing arrangements. If you don’t, you’re likely to find that the reservation you made with Soon-to-Merge Airline A to fly on Soon-to-Merge Airline B has disappeared into the ether and you have no seat on either carrier.

The Fine Print…

If you must handicap the current merger game, focus on Northwest Airlines. It holds a “golden share” in Continental Airlines that gives Northwest the right to block any merger agreement involving Continental. (Northwest got the share in 2001 when it sold its stake in Continental.) But the moment Northwest is involved with a merger, Continental can redeem the golden share for a $100 fee and be free to pursue its own combinations.

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