This is the moment you’ve been waiting for! On last week’s Frequent Miler on the Air, we announced our picks for the 2025 Bonvoyed Awards. Now it’s your turn. In the poll below, you can give your take on the most important award of all: the readers’ choice winner for loyalty Grinch of the year.
Read through the nominees and then vote for the loyalty program that you think was the most disloyal to its customers in 2025 – the program that Scrooged us so much that they out-Bonvoyed Marriott.
Who do you think deserves the nod for the People’s Choice 2025 Bonvoyed Award?
2025 Disloyalty Nominees…
- Airline & Hotel programs
- ANA ends Round The World awards
- British Airways devalues Avios
- Emirates makes multiple customer-unfriendly changes:
- Restricts first class awards to elite members
- Hikes surcharges on flights between US to Europe, and US and Colombia.
- Causes transferable points programs to reduce transfer ratios or drop them altogether: Amex, Capital One, Chase
- IHG limits free point transfers
- Hilton increases award prices. Top standard room point price now 250,000 per night.
- Marriott abruptly dumps Sonder – guests being chucked out of properties the next day
- Southwest changes from “People First” to “Profits First”: charges for checked bags, decreases point earnings, adds customer unfriendly expirations on travel credits, increases credit card annual fees.
- Turkish kills the Hawaii sweet-spot award.
- Wyndham splits with Vacasa. No more booking Vacasa vacation rentals with Wyndham points.
- Credit cards
- Amex reduces transfer ratio to Cathay Pacific. Is this signaling a trend?
- Amex restricts Business Platinum 35% points rebate to selected airline only
- Capital One eliminates Venture X free lounge guests and adds fee for authorized user lounge access.
- Chase complex-ifies, coupon-ifies, and cost-ifies the Sapphire Reserve card. Chase increased the annual fee, eliminated 3x for all travel, eliminated 1.5 cent per point redemptions via Chase Travel℠, added piles of coupons, and more.
- Chase ends The Edit’s guaranteed 2 cents per point value.
- Chase stops the Ink train (adds lifetime language to Ink cards)
- Chase eliminates Priority Pass unlimited guests for Ritz cardholders
- Citi botches Strata Elite rollout. New cardholders locked out of their accounts.
- Mesa abruptly shuts down all card accounts.
- US Bank nerfs Altitude Reserve.
- US Bank nerfs Smartly card less than 1 year after launch
Reader Dis-Loyalty Picks…
Drumroll please… The 2025 People’s Choice Bonvoyed award goes to… Please pick your choice below.
Loading ...Greg & Nick’s Picks
On the 2025 Bonvoyed Awards Podcast, the winners were as follows:
Nick’s pick: Southwest changes from “People First” to “Profits First”
Greg’s pick: Chase complex-ifies, coupon-ifies, and cost-ifies the Sapphire Reserve card
Past Winners
2024 Bonvoyed Awards
- Nick’s pick: Hyatt breaks our hearts with Mr & Mrs Smith
- Greg’s pick: Hyatt breaks our hearts with Mr & Mrs Smith
- Reader’s Choice: Hyatt breaks our hearts with Mr & Mrs Smith
2023 Bonvoyed Awards
- Nick’s pick: Aeroplan’s Etihad alliance goes astray
- Greg’s pick: Hotels.com becomes 5x less rewarding
- Reader’s Choice: Amex family rules limit access to points parade
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
The Sapphire Reserve grift just goes on and on. Seemingly a large number of EDIT hotels that are available with the Preferred are now showing sold out with the Reserve. Maybe I could see this at chains that will recognize elite status because they would use different booking channels but this is happening with hotels that have no loyalty programs. My frustration is centered on a $1200/night Belmond hotel, but seeing reports of it happening at many other EDIT hotels as well. Did Chase not envision people having both a Preferred and a Reserve to be able to compare availability?
What a deal, pay 8 times the price for a card that gets you less availability through Chase travel.
The USBAR nerf was such a gut punch. Then cutting point values without adding any transfer partners, or telling us when they will be available, or even who they are is just adding insult to injury.
R.I.P. Vacasa it was a great ride!
Yeah, Chase CSR for sure. The whole thing just totally p!ssed me off on Chase. Why take away cruises, car rentals, tolls, etc? Those things put CSR at the top of my wallet. Those point earning items cannot have cost Chase a lot. Now, I won’t even take it out of the house.
The CSR’s bigger pain point is the coupons. The loss of 2cpp will be felt but it is of less consequence. Chase knows what it needs to work on.
What about United eliminating open-jaw?
Hilton gets my vote this year for their multiple near back-to-back stealth devaluations.
The Msrriott/Sonder fiasco affected few people (I was not affected) but it was a major, major, MAJOR Bonvoy.
Southwest is the winner. They didn’t devalue a card or a loyalty program, they devalued an entire airline that was profitable and successful for decades.
Basically all the things that made them unique are gone: open seating, bags fly free, no Basic Economy, elite benefits that actually were benefits, non-expiring credits. The only thing left is Companion Pass. Once that’s gone, so am I,
For many years I never bothered to check other airlines for domestic travel because they offered what I needed: routes, pricing, CP. Now, for the first time in a long time, I’m looking at other airlines. This is from someone who earned the highest A-List Preferred status.
Elite status is basically meaningless now. A-List benefits can be had with a credit card and the only real benefits of A-List Preferred are seat selection and 2 free drinks. (Wifi used to be a benefit, but now that’s free for everyone.) In the initial announcements they said this of elite status – “COMING SOON: Same-day change comes with even better seat options.” When the actual changes were rolled out, same-day change was no longer an elite benefit, but a benefit tied to fare type.
Basic Economy replaced Wanna Get Away but with fewer benefits and same price. So in addition to all the changes, the real cost has also gone up.
The Edit boondoggle should really be looped in with the CSR relaunch. A huge part of why I was tentatively okay with the CSR changes was because I could get a guaranteed 2 cpp on my UR points through The Edit and earn hotel points while doing so. Chase advertised this pretty hard during the change and to roll it back so quickly is really unconscionable, especially when combined with the larger nerfs to that card.
Hot take: Emirates changing transfer ratios to 5:4 is the biggest long-term bonvoy in AWARD travel (Southwest might be the biggest bonvoy in travel). I don’t think that Emirates new transfer ratio by itself is the biggest bonvoy, but I’m concerned about the future.
Emirates leading the change to a 5:4 transfer ratio means that more programs can and will change their ratios in the future (see Cathay Pacific). This will greatly reduce the value of transferable points over the next few years. Different programs will change their transfer ratios at different times, but a good chunk of programs will change over the next decade.
Personally US Bank nerfing the Altitude Reserve card affected me more than anything else on the list. SW deserves to win because they affected many more people. Sapphire Reserve affects, like the Altitude Reserve, a much smaller group of people compared to SW.
Just to connect some of these dots, when Capital One nerfed the Venture X lounge access, my plan was to get a Sapphire Reserve to keep lounge access for two guests in the short term and a Bonvoy Boundless to PC to a Ritz card in the long term. With the CSR refresh, I ended up opting for an Amex Platinum instead, and with the Ritz changes now I’m contemplating a B of A Premium Rewards Elite. So where Chase could have picked up a customer on two different cards, now I’m seeing them as a much smaller part of my strategy going forward.
Southwest was my sentimental favorite because of their boldness at completely dismantling an airline people used to love. It was a gutsy move, and any other year they would have taken the award walking away.
But I have to give Chase a lot of style points. First they took a much loved card, raised the annual fee, and added a disappointing and rather short list of credits. Plus they tanked the 3x travel earnings and 1.5 cpp redemptions. Then they had an endless number of glitches and problems with the rollout with many reports of credits not posting that continue to today. Then it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to use The Edit credit for significant value, even at the short list of properties. Meanwhile Amex came out with their Platinum refresh, which totally stomped Chase flat. And as the coup de grâce Chase literally lied about 2 cpp points boost with The Edit and lied more when they were caught lying.
So as much as I would love to vote for Southwest, as a connoisseur of the Bonvoyed arts I have to give Chase my vote in recognition to their tireless and skillful devotion to the craft of screwing over their customers. Southwest is going to have to try harder next year.
I don’t think the “Chase Ink train” should be on this list. It’s a crummy and unfortunate development for sure, but these are Bonvoy awards after all. The Chase Ink changes just tightened up a very lax and generous credit card SUB/referal policy. While it was great for the years that it lasted, I certainly don’t think that Chase’s decision to tighten up its SUB policy for these cards (which, let’s face it, was a long time coming) should be classified as a “disloyal” move by Chase against its “most loyal” customers. IMO, Chase never had an obligation and never promised anything that it then “took away” from the crowd of Chase Ink-o-philes. (Myself included.)
I agree. It might have a big impact, but honestly hard to fault Chase for doing this. It had to end sometime.
Yes agreed. I will be a lot more displeased when 3x travel on CIP is removed!
Yeah, that will be tough if that happens. In that case maybe time for an Amex Green card plus Atmos Summit for international.