Points to prove

The pandemic has been tough on all travellers, but there’s one group on which it has been particularly harsh – still, don’t feel too sorry for them…

There are many tribes in travel, so let’s distinguish between just two of them. First, there are business travellers. Let’s assume that’s you. Second, there are others who look like you, but aren’t. They are frequent travellers, too – maybe even more frequent than you – but they travel not because they have to but because they want to. Many of them aren’t actually business travellers, but instead they make it their business to travel. So who are they? And why has the Covid-19 crisis been so tough on them?

Well, to identify them at their most glamorous, think of the George Clooney film Up in The Air. It’s not quite accurate, because the Clooney character had to travel because of his job, but the relish he took in being an expert traveller, and the importance and benefits he felt he derived from his status (in every sense) – well, that’s a definite characteristic of this group. Let’s call them Points Addicts, although the points are more of a symptom than a cause.

For eight long months and counting, they have been grounded, abandoned and unloved, regular travel a faint silhouette at the far end of an empty airport terminal. In the recent past, these addicts burnished their social media profiles with the customary photo of their glass of Bolly fizzing away in BA’s Concorde Room at Heathrow T5. By the summer, they were forced to post pictures of their Eat Out to Help Out family meals at Pizza Express. And it’s hard to concentrate on loved ones when your Premier Platinum Elite Ambassador Club status with your airline of choice is looking increasingly precarious.

BACK DOWN TO EARTH

In the past, remedies to a hiatus in travel were easy to come by. A simple “tier point run” and your gold card could be retained. (For those who don’t know what a tier point run is, it is an intense series of flights taken for the sole purpose of getting or retaining airline frequent flyer status.)

Since this is currently not possible, and the addicts’ status levels have been left hanging in the balance with frequent flyer miles collecting dust, they could only take to social media, blogs and forums to lobby for its extension. Luckily for them, valued clients of the airlines (ie, you, the business travellers) were in a similar position, although at that point you were probably preoccupied with saving your companies or working out how to manage a team suddenly reliant on remote working. Once their status was secured, it was back on to social media to feel wistful for the nights in January when they would stay up until the early hours to grab those early-bird first class Avios seats to Cape Town over New Year, followed by a rush to grab seat 1K – because, let’s face it, any other seat just doesn’t cut the mustard.

It’s not the same, though, when you can’t feign exhaustion at having to endure the fourth transatlantic “hop” this month. And how can you spark the envy of fellow subscribers to a points blog without boasting of securing a discounted business class ticket from London to Dubai, earning double Avios by ticketing it in Belarus and flying via Phoenix? Instead, they are left booking and then rebooking tickets, since no fees are being levied as the airlines scramble to hold on to any cash that customers are prepared to give them.

But it’s not the same as travelling, these endless computer games on airline websites. So here are five tips to help them cope during this traumatic time:

1. Remember that business travel is a means to an end and not an end in itself.

2. Essential business travel should be just that. Aviation isn’t environmentally friendly, “the pond” is not a pond and airliners burn 30,000 gallons of fuel to cross it, so fly when you really need to – either for work or a well-earned holiday – not just to retain status.

3. No one is defined by their frequent flyer programme status and, if they are, it’s not in the way they think.

4. If you are the sort of person who is “impressed” by travel, then recognise that really impressive travellers don’t have any status at all – they have their own jets.

5. Your grounding is at least freeing up seats for former airline staff standby passengers like me!

For eight long months, Points Addicts have been grounded, abandoned and unloved

Of the many industries hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, aviation has taken a particularly big knock. At the height of lockdown in April, flights were down by 94 per cent across the world compared with April 2019. Thousands of airline jobs have been lost, huge bailouts have been granted by governments, and low demand will persist for some time as travel restrictions and social distancing combine with passengers’ reluctance to board planes and get cosy with strangers. We might wonder when air travel will get back to normal. But given that the impending climate emergency has not gone away, perhaps the better question is whether it should it get back to normal at all.

FUEL TO THE FIRE

First, back to basics. The lifeblood of aviation and the main source of its pollution is kerosene, a fossil fuel. Burning one tonne of kerosene creates about three tonnes of carbon dioxide. Burn 359 billion litres, as the aviation industry did in 2018, and you create about 900 million tonnes of CO2 – more than Germany’s entire economy.

The other thing to know about kerosene is that it is untaxed for international flights. This tax exemption is a quirk of the so-called “Chicago convention”, signed in the late 1940s between world leaders drawing up rules for aviation that still apply today. It is kerosene’s tax-free status that has given aviation a competitive advantage over ferries, night trains or high-speed rail, enabled budget air travel, and is what makes it financially unattractive for the industry to invest big in alternative fuels.

So aviation is, at its core, a fossil fuel business, and a growing one. Pre-Covid, industry body IATA predicted a doubling of 2018 passenger numbers by 2038, meaning far more greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, the industry is set to account for almost a quarter of all emissions globally, and be the UK’s single most polluting sector.

Without some meaningful changes in behaviour and policy, Covid might delay, but not stop, this trend. Aviation recovered quickly from slumps following 9/11 and the financial crash of 2008. It could easily do the same after Covid, especially if aviation continues to enjoy its privileged position as a low-tax industry.

This tax exemption often seems like a sacred cow of aviation, but how long can it last? When governments seek to repay eye-watering debts incurred in this crisis, through austerity measures or tax rises, aviation’s privileged tax regime may seem like an unfair historical anomaly. After all, you pay significant tax on a litre of car fuel, or a pint, but none on jet fuel. After the industry has got back on its feet, we’ll need to talk about tax.

Taxing fuel more could lead to two positive outcomes. First, if set at an appropriate level, it would reduce demand so that some less “essential” flights simply don’t take off. The industry would no doubt respond to this, so a second outcome would be a step-change in research and the scaling-up of cleaner alternatives to kerosene, especially synthetic “electrofuels”, which currently can’t compete with untaxed kerosene.

Airlines and airports would rather discuss alternatives such as carbon offsets, more efficient planes and routing, and future unproven technological breakthroughs. But given the limited time remaining to avoid climate breakdown, we need to get more radical. How to implement this? A “flat” carbon or fuel tax on flights would be the simplest to roll out, but a more targeted tax would be fairer. So the idea of a Frequent Flyer Levy (FFL) is gaining traction as a way to ensure access to flying is shared more equitably. An FFL would mean everyone gets one return flight tax-free per year, but subsequent ones are taxed at an escalating rate. So if you were to fly 20 times a year, it would cost an order of magnitude more than today.

Are we ready for the end of cheap flights? Perhaps lockdown has given us a practice run at a future with more Zoom calls and less flying. Some surveys also suggest Covid has increased concern over climate change. Maybe now is the time to start seeing flying as a luxury and taxing it as such, until we have really figured out a cleaner way of doing it. More details on the FFL can be found at afreeride.org

Given the limited time remaining to avoid climate breakdown, we need to get more radical