ITA Airways, latest promotions 'got out of hand': Volare blocks points transfer between accounts
In the past few hours, members of ITA Airways' Volare loyalty program have received an e-mail communication informing [...]
ITA Airways
SkyTeam
In the past few hours, members of ITA Airways' Volare loyalty program have received an e-mail communication informing them about the temporary blocking of the ability to transfer points between accounts.
In this article:
What is point transfer
One of the possibilities offered by the FF Volare program is to transfer, up to a maximum of 60k points per year from one account to another, as of today this possibility suspended "to allow for some verifications" as written in the email received by subscribers and forwarded to me at least 100 times in the last few hours.
Volare's two latest promotions
I have had the opportunity to write several times about how the Volare program is very much, very, generous in terms of points disbursed to their enrolled, it is equally true, however, that points have a fixed and very low value than what is offered by other loyalty programs.
Among the many promotions, I think two literally got out of hand Or at least did not run as smoothly as planned.
The last time it was "introduce a friend" promo launched this was suspended suddenly and prematurely. There has been no official communication, but I think it is easy to see how many people have exploited the rules or as the Americans call them loopholes to "cheat" the system.
The promotion allowed the presenter to get up to 10 thousand points, simply by introducing a new user. Unlike what has been done by other programs in the past, the bonus was disbursed upon creation of the user, even if the user did not book any tickets.
Therefore, it seems likely to me that users, By exploiting bots they were able to automatically create thousands and thousands of fake accounts, generating thousands and thousands of bonus points, points then transferred to main accounts to be turned into credit, this is because the Volare program, as we have repeatedly said ,does not have an award chart, but only allows turn 1000 points into 5€, this means that by accumulating with this technique 60k points you would be with 300€ credit without ever having spent 1 euro with the company.
The promotion was suspended and never reactivated.
The second promo to be, in my personal opinion, got out of hand. was the one recently launched with American Express. Excluding the fact that many owners never received the promo launch email, myself included, the problem was that the different possibilities were meant to be exclusively available to Amex customers, but since there was no prior control thousands of non-Amex holder users took advantage of the promo, also because the code (the same for all) and the forms to apply for the benefits had been published on a public page And not exclusively accessible to owners.
In addition to this on the net real "guides" popped up explaining how to exploit all possible avenues to "cheat" this promo. The main one was the one that prompted thousands of users to create a second Volare account where to activate the promotion for new members, get the premium level and then make a request to move the points present on the old account to the new one where the new status had been implemented.
It would seem like a small damage, but being able to add up the promotions users thus found themselves from zero to 75k qualifying fly points, only 15 thousand away from Executive status, the top tier of the Volare program obtainable with a single ticket for a few hundred euros.
Creating further confusion and raising further expectations, which were completely belied by the T&Cs of the promo was The issuance, of virtual cards of new users with an expiration date of January 25 and not, as planned January 24.
Last but not least, some premium users, generated through this promo, have found the possibility of giving away status active. Benefit provided exclusively for Executive status holders.
The previous
Impossible to forget the epic fail of the very first promotion launched in the early days of the program by American Express dedicated to holders of old Alitalia cards.
At the time of being able to "collect" the award, the holders had faced a rubber wall, or almost. ITA Airways had not opened classes for booking award tickets on the (few) intercontinental routes at the time, the call center was not at all trained to receive customer calls, and many had desisted from attempting to book the award given the many difficulties and the very small choice of seats available (like the old Alitalia).
In conclusion
Now we will see how Volare will deal with the many duplicate accounts and whether it will patch point transfers to those who have taken advantage of the various ploys to cheat the system. Speaking of cheating, I have written in the past a guide of How it is not possible to cheat hotel chain loyalty programs.
