Rail passengers have launched an 11th-hour bid to save the East Coast Rewards loyalty scheme, following plans by the Stagecoach-Virgin consortium – which takes over the franchise next week – to scrap it in favour of Virgin Atlantic airmiles or Nectar points.
The scheme, which launched in 2011, is said to be one of the most generous in the industry, offering customers spending £255 on train tickets enough points for a free standard single-class ticket.
In contrast, a £255 spend under the Nectar scheme will only earn enough points to buy a sandwich – with passengers having to spend thousands of pounds before they qualify for free travel.
The new company, Inter-City Rail (ICR), takes control of the Edinburgh-London route on March 1 and announced the loyalty overhaul in January.
Dan Hopkins, founder of the ‘Save East Coast Rewards’ campaign, told the Herald Scotland: “One of the arguments they’ve used for Nectar is that it has a whole load more partners, the obvious one being Sainsbury’s. But from April, Sainsbury’s are also halving the number of Nectar points that you can earn in their stores, so you’ll need twice as many points for items as you do now.
“Even if you were interested in earning Nectar points, you might as well book your ticket through a First Group website because they give points for all train travel. If they thought the scheme was too generous they should have tweaked it slightly, instead of wiping it out completely.”
Passenger Focus, the consumer rail watchdog, is reportedly due to raise concerns over the new loyalty scheme in the wake of a customer backlash.
But spokeswoman for Inter-City Rail said: “Before taking the decision to introduce the Nectar scheme, we used a market research company to survey around 2,000 East Coast passengers and we also held focus groups with existing customers. The results demonstrated that Nectar was by far the most popular loyalty scheme amongst those people who took part in the research.”
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