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Another article in The Wall Street Journal to fuel passengers' frustrations with frequent flyer plans ("Mileage Plans Add to Flier Ire", 10/17/2007). There are some nice factoids in there to illustrate just how pervasive, yet useless, plans have become (e.g., Northwest Airlines has 510 partners for WorldPerks, including 41 new partners this year).

The best gem comes from American Airlines. To support their argument that reward seat availability is NOT declining, a spokesman notes that frequent flyer travellers actually increased from 2005 to 2006, from 7.2% of passengers boarded to 7.5% of passengers boarded.

That sounds impressive, but it's actually misleading. Especially if you take a look at two other facts:

1) If you look in the American Airlines' 2006 Annual Report - it tells you that the number of award redemptions was actually FLAT for the period at 2.6 million [tickets].

2) During the same period, AA's "Passenger Boarded" (segments) volume increased 0.1% (per Airline Business Magazine statistics).

All this tells you is that the Frequent Flier Passenger-Boardeed has increased - but NOT the number of actual tickets. This suggests that frequent flyer availability is tighter, and these fliers are having a tougher time booking direct fligts. But kudos to American for representing the numbers to their favor.

OK - Extra credit for Airline Numbers Nerds follows. AA's PB's in 2006 were reported to be 98.139 million. 7.5% of that means 7.360 million PB's were associated with 2.6 million reward tickets. This yields 2.83 PB's per reward ticket, which is a bit higher than a common industry assumption of 2.5 PB's / Ticket.

FMV has learned long ago that you have to go into the numbers to get the real story - Any time you need a peek behind the WSJ's numbers, you know where to find us.