Around January 27, Air Miles made the move of quietly lowering the value of points in the reward program without informing its collectors, which surprises and angers the collectors. One of the collectors declares that she felt like Air Miles had stolen over $2000 of available travel to her, pointing out the unfairness form the collectors’ perspective. On the other side, Air miles made its different claim that the adjusting of price for vacation packages is due to the fact that it is a “subsidized” rewards category requiring a higher level of consumer support, emphasizing its original roots of its actions and defending itself from the criticism. While Peter believes that Air miles is doing this in order to make up for lost profits since its owner Toronto-based LoyaltyOne just canceled its expiry policy, Air miles insisted that it is their policy to be able to change their program at any time without notice to the collector, which explained its action of hiding the change, and that it hasn’t lower the value of miles in any other category but without indicating what it would do to make up the shortfall, which from my point of view is not responsible and not showing sincerity to solve the problem.
It seems to me that the news is related to what we learned in Chapter 2: perception, personality, and emotions. People have different perception of a single situation since they have different attitudes, motives, interests, experience, expectations, and different targets. In this case, the collectors are angry toward the situation because they care about their own profits and lost; they see the dropped values caused by Air Miles in the first place because they consider it from a collector’s point of view. Meanwhile, Air Miles also care about its own earning and lost; the adjustment looks fair to them, or at least claimed to be fair by itself is because they consider the benefit brought by it to be more significant than the comparatively slighter harm to its collectors. They have opposite expectations in terms of values, therefore holding distinct opinions and perception, which results in disagreement and conflict.
In the group of collectors, consensus occurs since almost all of them are against what Air Miles did, including lowering the values, hiding its actions as well as not showing motives to remedy afterward.
Lastly, in my personal opinion, what Air Miles did is understandable but not acceptable since it is to me against the business ethics, and weather taking responsibility or not can really represent the firm.
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reference list:
- Harris, Sophia. “Air Miles Quietly Devalues Some Points, Shocks Collectors.”CBCnews. CBC/Radio Canada, 28 Jan. 2017. Web. 28 Jan. 2017. <http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/air-miles-devalue-points-rewards-1.3955506>