Constrained to drastically reduce their activities due to the coronavirus epidemic and containment, airlines, railways and hotels compete in commercial gestures towards their customers, and in particular those who subscribe to loyalty programs.
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Loyalty cards
Air France , the first in mid-April, decided to extend the status of its Flying Blue members - or 16 million subscribers - for an additional year, regardless of the number of flights flown.
The airline was followed closely by the Accor group and its 5,000 hotels. Its loyalty program, recently renamed "ALL", has 55 million members. Again, the status obtained in 2019 will be extended for one year regardless of the number of nights spent.
On the SNCF side , the "Frequent Flyer" program, for which the card is chargeable, only extends the status obtained before the crisis by three additional months and also extends the validity of the card by three months.
Discount cards
With regard to the reduction cards that customers buy in order to obtain better prices on tickets or overnight stays, the operators are all moving towards a postponement of validity.
Thus, at Air France , for all commercial cards - Senior, Weekend, Young and Subscriber -, the expiry date has been automatically extended by six months. " Even if it was complicated by computer, we were able to record these extensions without the customer having to do anything ," said Laurent Perrier, France sales director for Air France.
The same goes for the Business plus and Ibis business cards of the Accor group , the validity of which is extended by six months.
On the SNCF side , the 3.5 million passengers in possession of Weekend, Family, Senior, Youth and Liberty cards which expired between March 17 and July 31, see their validity uniformly extended until August 31.
