Finnair moved to a revenue-based model for earning award and tier miles back in March (read more here), making it impossible to calculate how many miles you would earn for mixed carrier itineraries.
I issued an Oneworld around-the-world ticket early this year (read more here) and began flying in October. However, I have encountered issues getting the flights correctly credited.
I had one BA segment that I couldn’t get credited to Finnair Plus without a retro claim process:
Finnair Retroclaim Experience With Missing British Airways Flight
And now I am also waiting for four segments from this same ticket + two other ones that haven’t shown up on my BA account:
British Airways Has Stopped Crediting Partner Flights?
I had a Finnair – Doha flight on December 11 that I decided to credit to Finnair, as this ticket was booked BEFORE the points to Avios slaughter in March.
Nothing was posted to my Finnair Plus account, so I opened a case through WhatsApp a week later.
There is then always the pending line in your online account statement, but there was suddenly a credit yesterday,
Finnair somehow managed to credit this based on “who knows what” at 8516 Avios when the correct amount would have been 56% more.
Finnair has assigned a value of 946 euros for this segment.
When they should have credited it under the pre-devaluation amount based merely on the fare class at 13340 Avios.
I opened another case with the Finnair WhatsApp chat to get the amount corrected.
You earn a lot fewer Avios under the “enhanced” and devalued Finnair Plus:
Finnair Plus Award & Status Point Earnings Down By Up To 92% After Program Change
Conclusion
It is practically impossible to determine in advance how many Finnair Avios and tier points you would earn under the current schedule, as it is likely the prorated revenue assigned to this specific segment per Oneworld rules and something that is never disclosed to us.
I genuinely doubt the segment value is 946 euros when this flight represents 6.1% of the total distance of all flights in this itinerary, for which I paid roughly $5K. However, it doesn’t matter; it should have been credited based on fare class and city-pair.
I have difficulty understanding these airlines that have moved to revenue-based programs. Their intention should be to draw people in and get them hooked rather than rewarding hub captives whose companies are happy to pay monopoly prices on routes without competitive fares.
Also, these revenue-based programs incentivize you to fly their alliance members OR on their flights but with other airlines’ codes if you are flying competitively priced economy or business class tickets (non-monopoly fares_.
I will exchange a small number of award Avios for tier points to make it another year of Finnair Plus Platinum, and then I will be done with the program.
It is a convenient airline for me when I need to fly to Finland to visit family members, but due to the current situation with its Eastern neighbor, it is so inconvenient to fly on them to/from Asia with a detour that adds hours to the flying time.
